For fifteen years, until 2010, I was a coordinator of Braziers International Artists’ Workshop. My summers were punctuated by time spent away from my London studio and spent in the Oxfordshire countryside, amongst artists from around the world. Although on some level being simultaneously an artist and coordinator was demanding, it was a way of understanding the needs of artists working separated from the familiar, and a way for me to recognise those needs.
The residencies I have participated in recently have varied in terms of the communal, sociable or solitary time allocated to each day. In Rome at the British School you have the luxury of a private studio and communal dinners with an interesting mix of artists and academics. In Spain, the studio is more open plan, but I worked outside much of my first visit, and then had dinner, eaten late together with the hosts and fellow artists, allowing for a long day. The residency in County Kerry was both by its location and its history, quite extreme. It is remote and the weather is wild and unpredictable. Although I had some knowledge of these facts and had prepared with waterproofs, books and materials, the challenges were the unknowns.
The residency is called The Cill Railaig Project and often referred to as as a retreat. Seven restored pre-famine cottages provide living and work space, one artist per cottage. This includes a Tig an Comhra, a conversation house, a communal element but I was there in February and keeping warm in my own cottage was a major priority, so I saw little of the other residents. To get there I drove from London to Liverpool, took a very rough crossing to Waterford and stayed overnight there. The sun was out next morning as I drove across Ireland to the Atlantic coast, studying maps and thinking of my time ahead, about my family connection to Ireland, about my schooling in a convent (in North Yorkshire) with Irish nuns and fellow pupils with names like Deidre, Nuala and Siobhan.
Though I really wasn’t prepared for a retreat, in fact it turned out that it was exactly what a part of me wanted. I enjoyed the silence – broken only by the wind (the cottages have two doors, one either side of the house, so you can choose the best one, wind-direction wise) The day stretches out ahead of you with little opportunity for conversation. When I needed more peat from the farm supplies shop the purchase was a simple one, maybe just a bit of a chat about the weather.
I had a digital radio, but there is no Wifi, I found a small old transistor and in the afternoons, I listened to an Irish speaking station that played opera, both foreign languages to me, so the sound added a layer to that of the of sheep and the rain. Each day I walked either up behind my cottage, up onto Bolus Head – from where you can see the Skelligs, or I’d walk down to the coast where there’s the remains of Ballinskelligs Priory. In the 5th century monks would sail out to the inhospitable Island of Skelligs Michael to live in beehive shaped dwellings. They lived in solitude and isolation; until in the 12th century they abandoned the island and established the Priory. There is evidence of past habitation, megalithic standing stones, stone circles and dwellings all along the spit of land on this most westerly point of Europe.
Since my time at Cill Railaig I have read Sara Maitland’s, ‘A Book of Silence’, and it made me rethink my time in Ireland. In the book she investigates what the draw to silence is and the deeper meaning of retreat. She writes much about those who spent time in the desert, hermits, living a harsh ascetic life, and I realise this is what was being replicated by the monks on the Skelligs. Maitland asks the question, whether the retreat to silence can be ‘something positive, not just an abstraction or an absence’.
But what also interested me in her book was the state of mind termed ‘accidie’, the fear of entering a stupor, from lack of contact, from being in one’s own head. Although in reality I was only on my own for two weeks, and I did speak to people, I had a sense of how accidie could begin. Not a depression, but a lethargy and an enemy of creativity. Unconsciously I knew it, I had that dread, so I planned my days, kept the fire stoked, cooked, walked and painted and painted, filling all the paper and canvas I had brought. Reading and making notes.
Looking back, it was an intense period of time, one with a particular draw in a world where noise, sound, and screens of many sorts interrupt our concentration. The studio is of course that, but with its own demands of travelling back and forth, and going to openings and exhibitions all part of London art world life.
The work I made in Rome changed my understanding of the daily practice of painting, how ideas can be followed through and how decisions can be made slowly and not forced.
The time at Joya in Spain, high in the Sierra Maria – Los Velez, touched on the retreat aspect of a residency by virtue of being on a mountain, land that is mostly desert, when the wind drops there is an incredible silence. I returned to Joya again at the end of last year, I needed that air and silence again.
The other shorter residency was in Susak, a Croatian island that involves quite a journey, and travelling alone it feels like the residency starts once you leave home, for a flight, then a coach journey, then a ferry, to arrive eventually on a reed-covered low lying island. No cars and few people make this an opportunity to find time for working, swimming and reading. I had an impromptu studio under a palm tree that was close to the church, the bell rang every 15 minutes, yet curiously it didn’t disturb me, it was somehow reassuring.
I have heard - well, even used - the term ‘residency junky’ and I guess it could now be applied to me, but I think that the journey within my practice is suited to this way of working. By that I mean spending intense time working outside my studio, because I return each time reinvigorated, with new perspectives. Some of that is from conversations with other artists, but I have a sense that the it is the shift in location itself, the limited materials and communication that suits me.
The work I have made on these residencies is divided, some of it stays as separate, more aide memoire than attached to my main body of work. But I have also made work that has directly influenced the studio work.
Those years involved in Braziers Workshop convinced me of the value of purposeful travel for artists, I saw so many lives change and I suppose it means mine was one of them.'
GILL ORD (2019)
