 Graduate Residency Award Winner 2025 Mawddach Residency was my first ever residency. I arrived very excited for time and space to explore a new landscape and to reconnect with drawing and painting after devoting my final year [of BA] to ceramics. I wanted to allow myself the freedom to really get lost within the experience. I did find myself getting lost—quite literally. In the first week, on my walks outside the studio, I would set off in one direction, second-guess myself, turn around, and end up a ways off from where I had planned. It was all new and exciting with so much to find and see, so I was always glad to be wherever I was. Though when this sense of disorientation carried into the studio, it felt different. I began working with familiar patterns and movements in my return to drawing and painting, but they no longer felt right for me. It took a couple of days to realize that was where I really needed to find a new path and approach things differently. I was drawn to the twisted, gnarled oaks surrounding the residency. I started by studying their trunks and roots, which slowly, in my mind, shifted into figures and hands. The trees felt like embodiments of endurance and adaptation, ideas that have become the core of my work. After being diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis the winter before graduating, I have been thinking about how to sustain my practice over time. The trees felt like a true reflection of that, adapting to their conditions and growing in unexpected ways. It was also such a pleasure to share the studio with my fellow resident, Freyja Needle. I was inspired by her perspective on the environment, what she collected from it, and how she translated it into her work. Watching her use of ink encouraged me to open a bottle of sumi ink I had brought with me, but never used before. On my final day, I made a series of quick studies of the twisted trees, working with a brush and allowing the uncertainty and immediacy of this new medium to capture the gesture and energy of the oaks. This process was, by far, the one I found most exciting.
I am grateful to Jake and Scarlett for awarding me the opportunity to attend, and I feel very fortunate to have experienced such a visually rich and supportive environment. In the transition from graduate student to artist, my time at Mawddach felt like a cocoon stage within the development of my practice. By the end of the two weeks, I had developed a deeper sense of both the place and my process, and I had managed to find my way back into something by taking the unfamiliar way. Alex Morante website
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
