Mawddach Art Residency

I am thrilled to have been selected as an artist-in-residence at Mawddach Residency in the Eryri/Snowdonia National Park in Wales for 2 weeks in January 2024. The images I’ve seen of the surrounding landscape and the artist’s studio that I will be using look stunning and I really can’t wait! In making my proposal it was interesting to contemplate what I might like to work on, it’ll be interesting to see if this changes nearer or during my time there…

Recently I have been making hand-stitched coats that incorporate stories and secrets in their linings. I am hugely inspired by folktales, especially ones where the unexceptional hero must overcome apparently impossible obstacles (spinning straw into gold, silently weaving barbed shirts for seven cursed brothers, finding the way home by following bread crumbs and so on). I am drawn to stories of transformation, whether physical or metaphorical; dramatic and magical or slow and ordinary, like ageing and nature.

On the residency, I would like to develop work which tells my personal story in a broader folkloric style. I am interested in looking at seasons of change, development, and cycles of nature & ageing as I enter the ‘elder woman archetype’ phase of my story and my teenage daughters begin the ‘main character’ phase of theirs. I would like to immerse myself in the slow and therapeutic process of hand-stitching a quilt or an article of clothing that investigates these. I am contemplating the layers of clothing that we put/pass on as we grow, and wrappings that get unravelled and rewoven to hold the subtly transformed bodies that we live in throughout our lives.  Like snakes shedding skin or Russian dolls; bodies nesting inside other bodies; or moths regenerating inside cocoons. I’d be interested to investigate a more performative approach to my work – perhaps filming myself stitching, gathering and processing materials, perhaps even dwelling on the, sometimes futile, attempts of characters in stories to complete their tasks, by making the un-doing and re-doing of the work as important as the initial doing of the work; unpicking, unravelling – how does this alter the materials? What evidence of its previous form does it retain? How do I feel about destroying my work to create new work from it?

One of the reasons residencies are so useful to me is that they offer a safely unpredictable space where I’m able to give myself permission to explore. The magic is always that I don’t know what will come and I don’t want to be overly prescriptive in my expectations of what taking a 2-week residency would achieve - I pick things up as I go, I tell stories as I find them.  I like to arrive with loose plans and lots of resources; opening myself up to the ways that solitude, silence and an inspiring environment guides my work and feeds my practice when I return home.