 ..click on/tap images for a larger view.. I am a bronze sculptor and much of my work on a day-to-day basis involves the long and technical process of producing the bronzes (building armatures, making molds, producing waxes, patinating the metal), as well as everything else that professional artists need to deal with these days (photographs, instagram, delivering work, marketing, exhibitions, etc.). I knew I needed to press a reset button when I realised I had started to talk about my work as a small business, rather than a process of artistic development, and being awarded this residency felt like a life-saver. I arrived at Mawddach, full of ideas about what the two weeks would hold. I planned to collect specimens of local materials and amass a ‘bank’ of textures and structures for future use in sculptural work; I was interested in the idea of inks and drawing materials collected from the estuary; and I wanted to push the idea of creating some sort of collated ‘portrait’ of the local landscape. I think I felt the need for a structured plan because as a figurative scuptor, I felt very under-qualified to respond to a scene as a ‘landscape artist’ might. I was absolutely entranced from the start by the estuary, the way it changes constantly with the tides and the shifting light during the day, and yet on the other hand it seems to have been completely unchanging for millenia. I was obsessed by the boulders strewn across the mountains, and the wind-shaped trees on the hills. I quickly ditched any pre-conceived notions about what I was here or, and just concentrated on observing the landscape and getting it down on paper, a massive shift away from trying to capture and catalogue the natural world, to just observing how it felt to be in it. Every morning, Claire and I would head out in separate directions after breakfast, and get back 7 hours later - I walked and noticed and walked and drew/painted and wrote masses of stream of consciousness words in rain-splashed sketchbooks, which I had to decode later in the studio. Mostly I just practiced paying attention. I stopped trying to conquer and control what I was drawing and concentrated on the experience of being in a space. I didn’t achieve anything on my original list, but the residency has been transformational in other ways. I learnt so much from talking to my fellow resident, Claire, but mostly I also just remembered how important it is to observe the world around you. Daily observational drawing, with the focus on feeling and experience as much as on factual accuracy, is now firmly back at the centre of my practice, and I am trying to allow the sculptural work to express some of the qualities of Mawddach as remembered from the sketches that I have papered all over one wall of the studio. Thank you so much, Jake and Scarlett, for the most amazing experience.
Arabella Brooke website
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