First residency in an agricultural setting. Awkwardness and permission. A sense of place.

Prior to launching The Landing Project, I've been lucky enough to already spend some residency days on the farm courtesy of funding from the Ulrike Michal Foundation for my co-project Imprinted Place. I wrote this piece as an initial response to that time and a host of thoughts about what it actually means to be an artist in residence and especially how to do this well and sensitively on working farms:
Despite having called myself an artist for a while now, I still so often don't really understand what this means or what to do. Then I do it. Despite some privileges I have scrabbled a just-about career together the entire time, lurching from commission to academia and very nearly going extinct several times. These first few days of residency have been an education in terms of what it means to situate yourself in an environment (in my case the lambing shed) whilst calling yourself an artist. The settling feeling of having time and space to think is truly profound after a busy few years of motherhood, often squeezing in guilty moments to make work. This feeling of peace and particularly permission to take time feels to me as fresh as the wind, an experience that is joyously ringing with possibility.
There have definitely been awkwardnesses. It's a bit weird to hang around on the farm and draw and also pitch in with some jobs: often I feel like an interloper and often fail to get the right words out to explain myself to the patient people around me going about their daily labours. In the past this might have stopped me even trying, but now this awkwardness seems like a crucial 'picturestuff' and is absorbed into the whole. The outcome of the residency days on different sites will be several series of print editions and also some collaborative works. The few days I've already spent have been so rich with ideas I feel I could already fill a gallery with images. I think this is working.
Walking through my current landscape around Weston Rhyn where the flat Shropshire plains meet the Welsh hills I see what's in front of me with a welcome impurity. My connection to this place is misty with traces of previous places, current thoughts about what land is and how it works, and visions of the future. Everywhere there are imprints of other people's activities: work and leisure going back hundreds of years. I collect something like 'dyestuff' but think of it as 'picturestuff'. It is a mix of imprints that are old, new, future, sometimes mine and sometimes not. It is drawings, conversations, thoughts and scraps of wool from the wire fences. I imagine myself as a sheep person: a big woolly creature rolling around in the landscape, crawling through hedges and picking up seeds and briars and muck and mystery that gets entwined and felted in the mix. I'll take this mix back and put it together into pictures in the studio. I have no idea if I can hold or shape it all or any of it but I'm willing to try.
On permission: coming quite late to a creative career I have found hangups accumulating like some kind of restrictive plaque on my spirit. Feeling not wanted or welcome in real world or thought areas has shut down areas of my map: locations I might otherwise have sent scouts to gather and bring back ideas, pictures and pathways. A recent stepping in to permission has occurred and with it a bravery to investigate and make art about areas I have shied away from despite a strong urge to travel there. The politics of land management, farming and food in a climate crisis are very raw and there is a lot of change happening across the UK. I have found the discourse of late is often very shouty, hierarchical and inhospitable from all sides, tending to funnel to a dead end and hopelessness. With the knowledge that all I'll ever really be doing is picturing '...my own place in it', I will try to open up a little space by making some pictures about what happens to land in my small home patch and how some of the people who live and farm here feel about it. I will also have the opportunity to share some of this art making with others through workshops and events and I'm hoping to cultivate real hospitality in what I do.

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