Residency at JOYA AiR, Almeria, Spain

March 2022

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To describe my time here, in words, may be like trying to capture the movement of billowing smoke, or the sensation of breath moving through the body. Below are a number of thoughts I had both during and after the residency, some fully formed, others less so: 

First of all, there is the silence. It smothers you here, but in the most pleasurable kind of way. 

The lines you draw as a child – the ones that delineate a landscape, the ones that Google still uses to symbolise that which is an ‘image’ – are seen in each direction you look, through every window you gaze out of. The up/down slope of a mountain, the waves and curves of trees, of clouds, horizon lines where the sky meets the earth. 

The simplicity of that, of these lines, is everywhere here, yet there is also a complexity to them, lying within the land, within the mechanisms of earthly, ecological and geographical systems. 

The land overtakes you – so much so, at times you can’t see, or don’t know yourself as other from it. You lose the idea of yourself as a thing. Or maybe, more accurately, you become less attached to ideas about things. 

Everything is happening below the silence.

When I applied, over a year ago, I wrote about wanting to rekindle with the act of putting paint to a surface. I had imagined myself immersed in oils, spending the days strengthening my ‘technique’ and maybe leaving with some sense of a higher command over a brush. In the end, I barely used a lick of it – its materiality felt almost too manufactured to work with. 

Instead, I made shapes with fabric found from broken deck chairs – fabric that once held the weight of horizontal bodies in repose – containing a stiffness, a bodiliness of their own, that could hold my gestural manipulations in place.

I drew, by way of mixing chalk dust and old rainwater on unprimed pages of a small sketchbook. I used pieces of masking tape to seal the edges of these pages, then transferred the stained tape to the wall outside my studio, gathering a collection of horizon lines, forming outwards. Nature did the rest of the work for me. Sand particles from an unanticipated Saharan dust storm rained down over the land, not only casting everything in an eerie sepia light, but trapping residues of wet dust in the grooves of the tape. 

Incidental, elemental paintings – only there if you chose to look.