Dana Ferchland

Two weeks have now passed since the end of my residency, weeks that have allowed me to spot the patterns in my responses to the many questions of 'How was it?'. Going into the residency, I imagined it to be challenging and intense and expected myself to peel away some of the habits that I have wrapped my life in. I was right on all three accounts. My project was an intensely personal one and to find it resonating with Scarlett and two other artists on my last evening has moved me more than I ever thought it would and I am deeply grateful to Jake and Scarlett for trusting me with two weeks of creative freedom.

For my project, I wasn't so much interested in the landscape or history of the estuary, instead focusing on signifiers of an old everyday life (giant buttons, the smell of charity shops, the colours of road signs, a pub) and using them to pick up a thread that was dropped years ago, to see where it would lead me.
The residency has allowed me to quietly explore how a project can intuitively develop, how I can move on when I realise that my initial idea is already spent and I have a week and a half to take things further without knowing what 'further' even means, how to trust myself creatively.

The black and white of my prints and paintings tie them to the poems that were the starting point for my residency, small observations typed in black on white, but over time I found myself moving away from the idea of illustrating my writing and moving towards a search for a different way of expressing what was already expressed in the poems. Once that search had started, my experiments with making different marks with different tools, including my laptop, an E guitar string, my mug, naturally changed into exercises in disciplined obsessive small format mark making until the search eventually culminated in big painted barely recognisable bodies, exploding into being in only a few minutes.
In this, my prints and paintings almost by accident illustrate how difficult I find it to grasp grief and rupture, to make sense of the many layers of change that have allowed me to build up to the residency. Now, two weeks later, I can sense that the residency is not yet over for me, but will continue to shape my understanding of the creative process.

Dana Ferchland
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