Beginnings

Thank you Anthony for this opportunity. It's true, my life is about to be turned upside down! I am expecting my first baby in May and while I have every intention of sustaining my art practice during the rest of my pregnancy and after the baby is born, I know I will need to adapt to very different ways of living and making. My hope is that this residency will act as a kind of anchor, a point of focus; a place to collate my thoughts, present seeds of ideas, test out works in progress. A virtual space I can return to over the next six months – even if just for short, stolen moments – to feel a sense of continuity with my practice.

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Since my partner and I bought our first home last year, in a 1950s East London estate, I have become very interested in town planning and social housing; the structure and geometries of modernist-inspired blocks; the way glass was utilised in the late twentieth century in the design and sunlighting of domestic and shared social spaces. These ideas have inevitably crept into the artworks I've been making – architectural studies and light-boxes; photomontages and video experiments that explore architectonic patterns and the 'image' of Modernism.

Re-frame (honeycomb house), photo collage, 2013

I have something of a plan for my time with Reside in that through February and March, while I'm still relatively mobile, I hope to collect photographic and film footage that I can work with in the months that follow – a kind of stockpile of negatives, rushes, photocopies, prints, references and reading materials. I am interested in comparing architectures of the Locksley Estate where I live (in particular a hexagonal church at the end of my road, built 1964) with other structures built in London in the late 1950s-60s. The Snowden Aviary at London Zoo for example. To explore ideas of the detached/bird's eye town plan and Paper Architectures; fictional or imagined landscapes; ideas of volume versus mass – the use of glass and other Utopian materials (aluminium, steel) to create structures that have a sense of transparency or weightlessness, walls as membranes... Colours and patterns of beehives and the honeycomb also recur in my work – palettes of back, white, yellow and blue; references to Frank Lloyd Wright's 'organic architecture', the hexagonal plan.

Snowdon Aviary at London Zoo. Photo: wikipedia.org

By late April and into May I imagine I will be more or less limited to desk-based activities – reading, writing, editing video footage, making small-scale collage works etc. I hope to continue all these things up to my due date and even once the baby comes but... we will see. I may not manage to make or think anything at all! or my practice might be a lifeline for me while everything else is in flux...

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Bibliography / Filmography (February)

Stephen Willats, Beyond the Plan, 2001
Juan Antonio Ramírez, The Beehive Metaphor, 2000
Robert Hughes, Trouble in Utopia, 1980
William M C Lam, Sunlighting as formgiver for architecture, 1986
Alex Hartley: Not part of your world, exhibition catalogue, 2007
Frank Lloyd Wright, The Future of Architecture, 1953
Kurt Schwerdtfeger, Reflektorische Farblichtspiele, 1922
John Smith, Leading Light, 1975
Ellard & Johnstone, Machine on Black Ground, 2009