 Neither of us had ever done an artist’s residency before, so we were delighted to be accepted for the Mawddach Residency. In our application we had said that we would like to work closely together in a sort of ‘Exquisite Corpse’ mash-up. We have been friends for years, but had never actually worked together, so it was going to be an experiment, which frankly could have gone either way. We have similar interests, but not entirely, so we had to find common ground. Also we had to be able to do our separate work. When we heard that we had been accepted on the residency we started having mini meetings and fairly early on Fiona commented that two was not a magical number… she insisted that “three is a magic number”. She then spent many months working in her studio before we left, making a life-sized third person - Alice, who would join us for the two weeks. Alice travelled on the back seat of Fiona’s van, arriving in Wales headless. Assembling her in the glorious studio overlooking the constantly changing estuary became Fiona’s practice. Sally had a vague plan to do 100 drawings, so went out each day with a rucksack full of materials. She also made a series of time-lapse films every day, of the weather, remarkable in that no two days were the same. The clouds race, the sandbars appear and disappear, the tide ebbs and flows, and the colours, they were extraordinary. It was hard not to spend all day just staring out of the studio window.
We did three long landscape paintings together, walling ourselves into the studio with a huge roll of paper. Using pigment and water, we worked spontaneously, changing ends often, and adding to and scrubbing out each other’s work. It was surprisingly harmonious, and not the ‘Exquisite Corpse’ bloodbath it could have been. We now have plans to continue this into the next phase of our joint project which will include the 3 or us, Fiona, Sally and Alice, with additional embroidery… Sally Muir website Fiona Haser Bizony
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