I’ve been preparing material this week for a talk at FAAP which signals that the residency will soon be over. Too soon. I wonder if this is always the case regardless of how much time you have? I have a bad habit of always feeling that I haven’t done enough, so I have to make a big effort to try and see my output rationally. Putting this talk together has been a nice vehicle to reflect on how I’ve been working and spot the gaps. For example, I’ve made good progress in how I approach the CGI and have gathered and formatted a lot of material, but I haven’t yet made as many compositions as I’d have hoped for. Overall though its comforting to take a global view of what I’ve been up to- especially in terms of joining the dots between previous works and this Brazil work. Happily it all makes sense

There is now a firm show confirmed at Workplace exactly a month after I get back to England. So, there is some time to develop the work further- but also an immanent deadline. A very helpful thing. In any case, although the residency is technically over next week, I’ve allowed myself a couple of weeks to travel in Brazil, so I don’t need to say goodbye to the country quite yet. I’m excited to be on the move and stimulate that precious feeling of foreignness and displacement again

Note to self: make prints more often

Getting in the studio at FAAP

So we had an open studio event last week. It felt a bit premature for me as I’ve only been working here for a couple of weeks, but it was a nice exercise in trying to condense what I’m thinking about into something that people can actually see. So, rather than pushing my images around in the computer I had to make some prints which is always a really useful process- in this case it definitely helped me to see how i’ve been approaching image making since getting here and arranging the edit on the wall restarted some dormant thoughts about constellations of images interacting with each other in a larger composition.

The key benefit of the open studio in terms of my productivity was that it forced me to knuckle down and deal with the CG stuff that I’ve been slightly avoiding for a while. I’m not an expert in 3D and although I’d been gathering photographic data in the right way and had an idea of the treatment of the image that I wanted to achieve, I’ve been shying away from making the final push as it simply involved forcing myself up a learning curve in Cinema 4D. The image above is the result of 2 solid days of staring at the computer watching renders trickle in, adjusting parameters and screaming ‘why don’t you work?!’ until realising the elementary mistake that had been made. Technical issues largely dealt with, I’m  now free to develop the series in other ways which i’m thinking is to continue to look at archetypal non-spaces such as this one and use them as ground and material for this kind of ‘painterly’ intervention.

Otherwise, there are lots of little thoughts bubbling up which I’m trying to keep hold of before they recede. Variously, some drawing, model-making- who knows maybe even a painting(!)