Eek, that's it, my six months are up! Having time to concentrate on my art, for the first time since I graduated, and with the Reside blog as my focus, has been a brilliant experience. One which I am sad to see end. 

It has been fantastic to stumble across painters with similar intent, using destruction and repair as processes of creation, but with different forms of expression, from Berlin to Argentina. I have really enjoyed looking and writing about other artists' work. Putting my thoughts down in black and white somehow helps me to articulate them more clearly to myself, encouraging me to research rather than assume a superficial understanding. I want to keep this up: the first habit which I hope has stuck.  

I started this blog thinking it would be about exploring materiality, the simplicity of the canvas warp and weft. Instead it has become clear to me that my work is about subverting the traditional role of painting as a window on the world.  Using landscape, that rather cliched romantic genre, to present a recognisable image and then subverting or disrupting it through collage and re-sewing. The latter, a feminine, deliberate, methodical way of expression, and of destruction, and of repair. I know that my interlude in Italy into copying a section of Botticelli's Primavera was confusing; but trust me, it was about learning the technique of painting in tempera not an about turn, style-wise.

Over the past few weeks I have literally sweated over re-sewing a piece: a drawing of nettles made in Berlin which I abstracted with purple threads.  It generated a lot of intrigue as I worked on it in hostels and on bus journeys.  But somehow at Ezeiza airport on the way home I lost it and all I have left is a photo of the original untouched drawing, memories and lost hours. Perhaps making art and being transitory aren't such a good mix after all, at least not for someone as careless as I can be. This certainly wasn't the injection of art into real life I had in mind when I rambled back in September about how exciting it would be to present art somewhere unexpected. 

What I do have to show from the last few weeks is drawings of the landscape of Argentina.  Huge plains stretching for hundreds of kilometers, bordered by the Andes. In making them I focused on perspective to articulate the scale of the country: the near and the far which stretches hours beyond where the eye can see. 

Now I need to set aside space and time to work on them, and the drawings I made on canvas in Berlin, as I settle back into my everyday routine. I suppose I have used Reside as a process for contemplation and creation, and it is that process which I need to keep up after I pass it to the next artist.

Which brings me very neatly to introducing the next Reside artist: Claudia Boese! Having developed the language of abstraction within her painting,  Claudia would like to move towards a figuration of ideas. Her studio in a church tower in Ipswich and a new allotment may serve as inspiration. But perhaps it's best if I leave Claudia to explain things in her own words. I look forward to seeing where Reside takes her over the next six months.                                                                               

So, all there is left is for me to say goodbye. Thank you Michaela for choosing me and giving me this experience. And to everyone who has read, commented and retweeted my blogs. The immediate reaction, feedback on how my work is developing, has been so valuable to me.  I leave you in the hands of Claudia, and with the one word which has been common to everywhere I have been over the past six months: Ciao!

I find myself in Argentina, a destination I have to fess up I didn't choose purely for artistic reasons. But yesterday I came across two Argentinian artists whose work really excited me. They are part of the fourth Andreani Award exhibition, a biennial show of contemporary national visual artists which is touring the country, and is currently in Cordóba where, by happy coincidence, I found myself too. I am writing this from my phone for the first time so let's see how it works...

Though their exhibited work is distinct from each other both cover themes which I use. Max Gómez Cante, the first prize winner, questions the relationship of the pictorial object to the viewer in his winning work, ¿hmm?. While José Luis Landet uses destruction as a form of creation in his piece, Porosidad. It is his work which I found most provoking because he creates by unsentimentally destroying the paintings of others.

Landet describes his material as fragments of paintings from the 1940s and 50s. These he has slashed in seemingly random strips or cut out the motifs of the paintings, leaving only the background, and reassembled the fragments haphazardly. What was no doubt lovingly created works, of mountains, lakes, forests and sea, are now reduced to their material value. I find it sad that a once loved view, cherished by the artist or the owner of the work, can no longer be seen. And yet, I imagine Lancet picked up his source material from flea markets or junk shops. In the UK there are certainly many discarded paintings in charity shops and I have considered using them as a source material as well. If they have already been rejected, why not recycle and reuse? But I find the wanton destruction of other artists' work difficult to deal with because it could so easily be my work that shares a same fate, or that of Lancet.

I tried to reconcile the layers of landscape into something recognisable as a whole. Did the strips of plywood collected together at the bottom and jutting into the mid-ground signify a jetty of some kind, the rest a lake? We're perhaps the strips ordered thematically which is why canvas edges are collected together in the centre of the piece? Instead, the details remaining from each picture drew me in: a bird sitting on a branch, a flock flying into the sunset, a fisherman by a lake. Details I might not have chosen to look at given the whole picture but revealed by the absence of the rest. Maybe this destruction isn't unsympathetic yo the original material afterall.

The work of the prize winner, Max Gómez Cante's ¿hmm? was two beautifully crafted frames through which he literally pushed his paintings to the edge, leaving the viewer with an expanse of white wall at the centre of the works. The order of frame and picture are reversed, when looking from outside in. If my translation from the spanish is correct, he describes this as posing a question for the observer about the relationship of the pictorial object and it's history. The paintings themselves, what I could glimpse of them, we're romanticised landscapes. Fields turning into hills into mountains as the eye moves from fore to mid to background. The hues changing from brown and green to purple to blue. They were similar to the landscapes destroyed by José Luis Landet and, as in his work, I found them captivating because I was not presented with the whole image.

This is probably my penultimate post before I have to hand over the Reside Residency baton to the next artist. If you'd like it to be you, you have until Sunday 26 January, 5 pm UK time to apply. Please take a look at the application information and send your submission via the contact form on this site.

I'll announce the next artist in my last post on the 31 January.

Here we are already: 2014, and the final month of my Reside Residency. Soon it will be time for someone else to take up writing here. I am both excited and a little nervous about finding the next artist. Excited to see who will apply from the diversity of artistic practice out there. The nervousness comes from wanting to find someone who will enjoy this space as I have done. I’ve really appreciated the chance to think out loud, experiment and see how my ideas have developed from post to post. Because I haven’t felt the need to be too precious Reside has given me the opportunity to be freer, to try things out and just see what happens.

Now, I think it is time for me to move from exploration to consolidation. I mentioned in my last post that I hoped to finish a work in which I was melding a painted canvas drawing I did in Berlin with another piece of fabric, abstracting the painted image.  I finished the re-sewn section before New Year, so here it is: a painting of weeds on elderberry-dyed canvas, with a section of saffron-dyed linen sewn into it (the same linen fabric which I was working with when I started this blog back in August).  Then I was sewing it into unprimed cotton duck and was concerned with how the formal qualities of the two fabrics would change on being fused. Here I am interested in that, but also in how the original image fragments, breaks down and diffuses as it is first disrupted and then repaired. 

I could, of course, have gone further; unpicking and re-sewing the majority or whole of the painted image, shifting the work further into abstract territory. I think there will always be a balance to be struck with how far to destroy, something I think all artists working in this area have to contend with. By nature I lean towards caution, so in the next piece I shall try to be bold, and take it right up to the edge of destruction before starting the process of repairing, to see what happens. While I was re-sewing this work I was also concerned that the traces of image weren’t strong enough in the section that has been unpicked - I think they come out stronger in the photographs than in reality - and I would like to unpick an image with a more developed initial painting using the tempera technique I learnt in Florence. I am also not sure how to frame or otherwise present the canvases; I see the embroidery hoop as something temporary which I will one day replace. The one thing I am sure about, is that this really isn’t where I saw my work going when I started in August, but I am pleased with where I have got to and excited about where I might end up. January will be a month spent needle in hand, reweaving canvas threads. Happy New Year!