In hindsight, I guess it was bound to happen although I wasn't expecting it. And I am surprised at how soon - just three weeks into my time off - it came. A few days ago, doubt grabbed hold of me and kicked me in the stomach with a sharp 'what ... do you think you are doing?' 'what do you really hope to achieve?'. 

There is no doubt that I am institutionalised having worked at the same place for nine years. I understand the rituals of my office and how to do them well. The pattern of answering e-mails and going to meetings is familiar to me, and in that there lies a comfort which it is easy for me now to feel nostalgic about.  

I have yet to establish how to properly sustain my practice. I don't feel that I properly own the title 'artist', even though I have been practicing and exhibiting a few times a year since I graduated. I have been reading Richard Sennett's Together: The Rituals, Pleasures & Politics of Cooperation which diffusely discusses the ways we interact with others, arguing for more of our sociable selves. In this context, it is funny - in the sense of odd - that I have chosen to leave behind my ties of home, friends, family and to try to learn by myself a new way to be. Choosing change to be a largely solitary pursuit, I have disassociated myself from my frames of reference. 

I know that I am happiest when I am doing, creating, executing a plan I can measure my progress against. I feel that this may lead me to making pieces before I have fully thought through the underlying ideas. I have tried to do things differently this time but it has left me in an uncomfortable position with little concrete to show. I have spent the past few weeks reading and exploring, open to the thoughts these activities have generated. I have experimented with dyes made from golden rod flowers, acorns and elderberries, of which the last was definitely the most successful. This has been enjoyable and I am slowly developing my concentration span, shortened through open plan office working and instant communication. But learning the new habits of being an artist will mean trial, analysis, repetition or rejection, and most of all time. A pattern familiar from my practice, but now one that I need to apply more broadly. 

In my work I tend to dissect, then reconstruct an image or the material I am using into something new. I think that this is the pattern this blog will follow as well.  Certainly, I am in full deconstruction mode at the moment. And I can only hope that after some time thinking about the elements of what I do - part of what my year out is all about - I will be in a position to (re)create with gusto! 

The first thing that I have started to consider in my work is the materials I use.  My work is pared down, abstract; and therefore the materials I use are very important as they are a large part of the subject of the work; very much visible.

First, an aside. I have navigated Berlin, where I have been for just over a week now in an ambiguous place between tourist and resident - one district at a time, soaking up textures, distracted by the play of materiality. From now pristine 19th Century stucco buildings, to layers of flyers unceremoniously pasted on walls, to building sites pretty much everywhere.  Contrasts of cobbled streets and matt tarmac shining with beer bottles worn into its surface. Public buildings have offered the chance for architects to experiment while public art is sometimes valued as a surface rather than respected for its substance.  

Quality materials offer the chance for people to demonstrate wealth and taste inconspicuously, which I feel is quite a Germanic (and I write this as someone who is half-German) trait.  Materials can subtly signify status. Our choice of the materials we use to build and furnish our homes and cities, and clothe us, are statements about more than our personal taste. In many cases, I think, we look to earn the respect of others in our choices, so helping to fulfill, according to Maslow, the penultimate rung in our hierarchy of needs. Getting the choice of materials ‘right’ is hard; in their simplicity there are few hiding places.  When thinking about materials I always defer to what is deemed to be quality: marble over mud, linen rather than nylon. This may be an issue.

In my work - like the piece below, still in progress, fusing cotton duck with saffron-dyed linen - I consciously use materials that convey a ‘fine art’ status. The canvas is a signifier that I see myself working in the tradition of painting rather than craft or sculpture, both of which are more often associated with the study of the physicality of materials. It offers people a suggestion, therefore, to read my work as exploring the role of painting as a window on the world versus an object. There is the essence of fabric – its weft and its warp – which I present through unpicking and re-sewing, reducing material density, producing a means to see through the fabric, drawing an awareness to the reverse side. Dying the canvas means colour is part of the material, not added to it. I engage intimately, one thread at a time, but the overall repetition of resewing creates difference, distorting the regularity of the machine-made weave. Finally, there is an authenticity that materials imbue, through their physicality, which is important to me. And, as Walter Benjamin wrote, distinguishes the original from copies, giving art its indestructible aura. 

One of the things that I am going to explore over the next few months is the effect of using found, recycled or second-hand materials. In moving away from materials I classify as belonging to a painter, I will see how the value of my work, and its meaning changes. Using materials which are not overtly in the tradition fine art may be a better fit with my intention to re-present and give new form to materials. They may assert the object nature of the work more clearly. So, at an art shop a few days ago I stared longingly at the beautiful sheets of pristine white paper available but opted for recycled newsprint. Paper seems like a good place to play.  Somewhere I won’t be too precious (because I see it as a lower quality material, with newsprint on the very bottom rung). I have started collecting materials with which to make colours: golden rod flowering by the canal, green acorns from Tiergarten park and a fragment of a brick. Alongside these experiments I will carry on weaving linen and cotton threads together, creating new material from the two, and I will think about whether I need the significance of canvas as a material and, if not, what I might use in its place.  

I was so excited to hear from Michaela a couple of weeks ago that she would like to offer me the next Reside Residency. I am really grateful that she picked me as it feels like a validation of my choice to take a year out of paid employment to focus on developing my practice. It has been over a decade since I graduated from art college and, while I have continued to make and show work in this time, I realise that I am working in something of a vacuum. I intend to spend much of my time reconnecting with the history of painting in which I am working, to ground and help focus my practice for the future.  I am also looking forward to having the luxury of time to play, and enjoy the process of making without the pressure of needing to finish a piece for the next exhibition entry. 

I first became aware of the Reside Residency over a year ago when Susan Francis was the blogging artist.  Since then I have enjoyed following how each new artist has developed their practice over the 6 months. I am particularly impressed that Michaela has continued to snatch moments of time to make work while looking after a new baby. 
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As Michaela mentioned in her last blog my residency is going to be transitory.  I have let me flat out to help fund my time off.  The last few days have been a whirl of finishing work, packing, tidying and cleaning. Now my sanctuary for a number of years is someone else's home. I have a couple of days of limbo before I fly to Berlin on Thursday, my case packed with various art materials.

Feeling restless, I decided to visit my great grandparent's grave in Lewisham to ground myself for an afternoon. I know very little about this side of my family because my grandfather died when my Dad was a teenager and for whatever reason he wasn't told stories about his father. The reason they intrigue me is what they did, which I have gleaned from researching past censuses, and the obvious links to my practice. Originally living in Eccles in the 19th Century, my great grandfather is described as being a 'clerk in silk maner', possibly a mis-transcription. Later at the start of the 20th Century in Forest Hill, he is a salesman in silk goods, while my grandfather is fabulously described as 'salesman fancy trade'. I wonder to what extent my interest in revealing the simplicity of fabric in my work is influenced by them, particularly as I know so little about their actual lives. I plan to read more about what their life might have been like, working in the cloth trade in Manchester.

The graveyard that they are buried in - Brockley and Ladywell Cemetery - is romantically ramshackle with nature being left to take over in many places.  I had visited once before, in May last year, and found the grave quite easily.  This time, map in hand, I walked right past it. After retracing my steps I found the spot where it should have been, and set about pulling brambles and tendrils to one side to reveal the grave again. For some reason it was and is important  to me that it is not totally lost. I have made plans with my Dad, who was visiting for the grave for the first time, that we will return in winter to clear it a little more. As I prepare to travel to Germany, where my Mum comes from, I do slightly regret that I won't be able to return to the cemetery in autumn when the brambles will be full of blackberries which I would like to use to create purple dye.