Gwithian Chapel Residency

Day 6

Over the past few days I have been catching up on writing and reflecting on the work, but today I am noticing how the space is slowly beginning to organise itself around how I naturally work.
I have made a small workstation for myself in the corner of the chapel. A table, my computer, books   It has become a kind of quiet nest where I can process ideas, next to the heater!

The rest of the chapel is slowly becoming a working space.

On the floor I have placed a number of square frames. I began doing this on the first day and the idea has stayed with me.  They are small fields of attention. Into them I’m placing fragments of my work. The fragments are currently stored along the pews simply so they are easy to reach. The pews are currently just acting like shelves in a studio. I am not sure if they will be part of the work. At the moment they are just practical.

The floor is where most of my attention is focused. Placing objects inside the frames, moving them around, taking them away again and trying something else. I’ve realised that what I am doing feels very similar to those puzzles you sometimes see in newspapers where you are given a set of words and have to find the hidden connections between them. The game is often about grouping things into fours.

Not so different from what I am doing here, looking for relationships between all the different strands I’ve brought in from the studio.  I collect and keep materials that might otherwise be overlooked, fragments of wood, broken ceramics, rusted metal, dirt. Over time these things begin to matter simply because they’ve been kept. They gather a kind of significance. I’m interested in how objects can hold traces of reverence, ritual and meaning. Maybe there is something about attachment there? Questions also about how one person might deem something valuable, important and presenting it in such a way that others can hopefully feel that.

For the moment I am simply allowing the chapel to function as an extension of my studio. I move between sitting in the corner writing and thinking and working on the floor with the frames and fragments. It is a slow process of arranging, noticing and rearranging.

It mirrors what is happening in my head. I am sorting through ideas and memories in the same way that I am sorting through objects on the floor.

This residency is less like a place where I need to produce something finished and more like a place where I can  work through these connections.