'The idea of "studio" is as much a fantasy as the idea of the "artist" is a fantasy. Both cease to exist when the work begins.If there is no work there is no studio, there is no artist. The stage of the studio is necessary, though, to enjoy the tortures of procrastination, for the enactment of the melodrama of solitude, for the playing out of visual monologues.'
-Charline von Heyl, The Studio Reader, 2010
My High Cross
Studio felt luxurious and civilised; it had a desk with a view of the gardens
outside, tasteful thick-pile carpets, a balcony where I would eat my lunch, and
plenty of wall-space to hang my paintings. It was a great
place to think, to curate, to write and to organise my thoughts.
However, as a
painter (an oil painter!) it was very strange to be cast into a space where I
couldn’t make a mess. I was used to working in a a studio littered with materials. I was so terrified of spilling something that it was
months before I allowed myself even open a bottle of ink.
The minimalist style of the house meant that very quickly any clutter would look like a disaster zone; sometimes I felt that just my presence in that room made it look untidy, and the persistent stream of National Trust visitors daily through the house did nothing to lessen my inhibitions. I had to find a new way of working. Although this felt difficult at first, retrospectively I can see that it helped to challenge my ways of working and push my practice into new areas. It was also the first time I had really considered how the parameters of the studio affect the work made; a subject that has now become an important part of my research.
The minimalist style of the house meant that very quickly any clutter would look like a disaster zone; sometimes I felt that just my presence in that room made it look untidy, and the persistent stream of National Trust visitors daily through the house did nothing to lessen my inhibitions. I had to find a new way of working. Although this felt difficult at first, retrospectively I can see that it helped to challenge my ways of working and push my practice into new areas. It was also the first time I had really considered how the parameters of the studio affect the work made; a subject that has now become an important part of my research.
'It’s an informed ‘playing around’ that aims to keep different elements ‘talking’ to each other, rather than to arrive at an aesthetic solution. However, aesthetic qualities remain indicative of imaginative ‘fitness for purpose’, like the goodwill that sustains a conversation between people who hold very different views on a single topic.'
-Iain Biggs, 'Two Dimensional Aspects of Deep Mappings'(online)
I used the space in different ways while I was there; initially I played around with paintings I had made previously, and hung them in the space as an exercise in curation. The space was so clean and sharp that it was an excellent place to display paintings, in a ‘White Cube’ kind of way; the eye was really drawn to work as there were few other visual distractions.
It was mid summer when I arrived and beautiful weather so I was anxious to spend as much time outside, walking, drawing and taking photographs. I found myself bringing back items of interest such as chestnuts, apples, leaves and feathers, and I would have to cull these on a regular basis or the space would start to become cluttered. Drawings, maps and notes were collected and pinned, in increasing number, to the wall. I had an old type writer so I also found myself making lists and collecting names of places and characters that I encountered during my walks.
On rainy days I would use my computer to examine and animate photographs into sequences, which would amuse and entertain passing visitors. From downstairs I could hear the Steinbeck piano being played by visiting musicians. I drank coffee, chatted with other artists, and arranged and rearranged the material. It was a comfortable and relaxed environment to potter about in.
I also made a series of paper 'thought sculptures' that examined notions of the estate outside from the perspective of inside.
By mid October it was darker, rainier and colder; harder to get out as much without bringing copious amounts of mud back to tread into the High Cross carpets. By this time, I had filled the wall up with my notes and drawings, and it was beginning to oppress me, so I sorted it in to different categories and turned the material into little pamphlets held together with bulldog clips and pinned these to another wall.
The empty wall gave me the mental space to work in a different way and, frustrated by not being able to paint, I made a series of automatic drawings, which referenced the walks I had made, and, being monochrome, the enclosing darkness of approaching winter. I had been thinking a lot about how the domestic animals in the fields around me had their instincts to wander at will curtailed by hedges and fences, so I cut up the drawings and pinned them to the wall for a while to see what I thought about them.
During December, the final month of my time a this studio, I took these drawings off the wall used them to make five, collaged ‘paintings’ embedding the in a cold wax medium that I had made from beeswax and damar varnish. They absolutely reeked of turpentine while they were drying, so I hid them in the pear wood cupboards of the studio to dry, like a guilty secret; some of them were still soft as I packed up and to leave at the end of the year as the residency drew to a close. As a result,I never actually showed the last artworks I made there. I had found a way to make paintings within the parameters of this space, that were in response to the the space outside. I felt a little sad that the House was closing as a gallery; some of the artists that had done residencies there before me had returned to show the work they had made in the gallery downstairs, and it seemed a shame not to have that opportunity.
