In 2019, I spent a period as an Artist in Residence on the Summer Programs at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. Supported in part through my Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice award, the residency gave me a studio in which to concentrate on a new group of paintings while entering a temporary community of artists, curators and educators working in and around the College.
A photograph of my studio from that summer shows paintings accumulating against the walls: works in progress, colour studies and larger compositions at different stages of resolution. I originally published the image simply as a glimpse into the studio. Looking at it now, I am more interested in what it records about the way I work.
My studios tend to contain several stages of a thought simultaneously. Finished and unfinished paintings coexist with earlier studies, fragments and experiments. One work suggests a possibility for another; something unresolved remains visible long enough to become useful elsewhere. I have generally worked in series, not because each series proceeds according to a predetermined sequence, but because I need to see relationships developing between works.
The studio becomes a place in which those relationships can remain active.
Fragmentation and Integration
The paintings I developed at Otis had the working title Postwar Fragmentation & Integration. They explored relationships between neurological memory, colour and form through acrylic and oil, with painted elements beginning to behave increasingly as fragments that could be separated, recombined and held within larger compositions.
This interest in fragmentation was not entirely new. Dots, geometric structures, interruptions and expressionistic forms had already appeared within my drawings and paintings, while Drapes had physically fragmented the painted field across multiple pieces of cloth and architectural space.
At Otis, however, these questions contracted again into individual paintings.
The movement between expansion and concentration has become increasingly characteristic of my practice. A painting may leave the rectangle and enter architecture, only for questions discovered at that scale to return later to a bounded surface. Forms move outwards and then back again.
Seen from the present, this is another example of the circularity I now recognise within my work. Development has rarely meant abandoning one form in order to progress towards another. It has been a process of allowing earlier languages to return under changed conditions.
A Studio Within a Community
One of the particular values of Otis was that the studio did not exist in isolation.
The residency placed my own concentrated period of making within a wider community of artists working across different practices and backgrounds. At the concluding AIR Open Studios, I showed the new paintings alongside fellow residents Carolina Hicks, Suwichada Busamrong-Press, Jasmine Monsegue, Sophia Sobers, Steven Pestana, Leah Busby and Daniel Castellanos.
For an artist accustomed to moving between Britain, Europe and the United States, such temporary communities are important. A residency provides time and space for making, but it also creates a particular ecology of attention. Other artists see work before it has settled into its public identity. Conversations take place around unfinished paintings. Ideas are tested informally and the assumptions one brings from another artistic context become more visible.
The unfinished state matters.
There is a particular kind of conversation that is possible around a work while it is still becoming, when neither artist nor viewer yet knows exactly what it will be.
Conversations with Meg Cranston
During the residency I worked with artist Meg Cranston, then Chair of Fine Arts at Otis. Our conversations about painting became one of the relationships that continued beyond the immediate period of the programme.
Meg and I have remained friends, and our dialogue about painting has continued over subsequent years. What interests me about such relationships is their reciprocity. Artists look at one another’s work from positions that are continually changing. A conversation that begins with one person’s painting can move towards another’s; observations circulate, are reconsidered and sometimes return years later in unexpected forms.
I have become increasingly interested in this kind of exchange as part of artistic practice itself.
It is difficult to separate completely what develops privately in the studio from what develops through conversation. Artists bring different histories of looking, teaching and making into dialogue with one another. Sometimes a remark alters a work immediately; at other times its significance only becomes apparent much later.
This is another reason why I find linear accounts of artistic development inadequate. A practice is shaped not only by the objects an artist produces, but by the people with whom ideas have been exchanged along the way.
Los Angeles as an Artistic Context
The residency also strengthened my relationship with Los Angeles as a place in which to work.
I have studios and working relationships in different places, particularly in Europe and the United States, and I have become conscious that geography affects the work in ways that cannot always be reduced to visible influence. Different cities create different rhythms of attention, communities and possibilities for encounter.
At Otis, my residency coincided with other forms of artistic and curatorial exchange taking place around the College. It was during this period that I met curator Dr Jareh Das, who was participating in the Emerging Curators Retreat. That encounter has subsequently become part of the longer network of conversations through which I understand my practice.
This matters to me because an artist’s development does not take place solely through making objects. It also occurs through looking, talking, teaching, travelling, friendship and sustained contact with other people’s ideas.
Places gather those relationships.
Over time, they become part of the work.
The Studio as a Place of Continuance
Looking again at the photograph of my Otis studio, I see less a record of a particular summer than an image of a methodology.
Paintings are leaning against one another. Some are resolved and others are still being tested. Ideas coexist before their eventual destinations are known.
This is close to what I now call Works in Continuance.
The studio allows different times within a practice to coexist. Earlier forms can remain visible beside new experiments. An apparently abandoned idea can suddenly become relevant again. A painting can contain the memory of an installation; a technique developed through textile design can enter a painted surface; a conversation begun during a residency can continue years after everyone has left the building.
Artistic development therefore occurs not only through the production of something new, but through the continuing reconfiguration of what is already present.
The Otis paintings belong to that process. Some questions they opened moved forward into later work; others receded. Some I may yet return to.
The studio photograph catches them at precisely that productive moment when their futures were still unknown.
Artist Residency
Artist in Residence — Summer Programs
Otis College of Art and Design
Los Angeles, 2019
New paintings developed under the working title Postwar Fragmentation & Integration, exploring relationships between memory, colour, fragmentation and form.
The residency was supported in part through my Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice project, Painting into Textiles & Back Again: Technique Exploration & Experimentation for Large-scale Installations.
Pictured: Intrapsychic 1, 2019
Acrylic on polyester
60 × 50 in