I am currently experiencing lockdown at my parent's home in London, where I grew up.
Prior to Covid I was making a body of work about lung disease and youth, having suffered a serious lung infection at the end of December and through most of January. When the world went into lockdown I couldn't continue on this because it felt too dark and surreal and my head was gone for a while. Being relocated to the house I grew up in was very strange, it was like entering a time capsule as the house is full of objects from my past and other family members history. My mum also used accumulate a lot of 'stuff' from charity shops and flea markets, so everywhere I look there is a wealth of objects that house stories. I have found daily drawing from these is therapeutic and transports me into all kinds of nostalgic and fantastical realms of thought. It also feels grounding to work from an object or a plant, to just study something and respond to it feels as though thre is a restorative power in the practise.
Whats last or current song you listened to (no cheating, we all have naughty
I tried to make Cawl, a Welsh lamb stew. I spent ages making lamb broth from left over bones, unfortunately it was a total failure and didn't taste anything like how my Grandma used to make it.
What's the next thing you are going to cook?
I had big plans to learn how to make my own bread when this all started but am yet to actualise this.
If everything in your house was going to be the same colour what colour
I used to as a child and being in this house is bringing them all back to me. I had a nightly ritual I used to have to perform before I could sleep. It was quite an elaborate process I had developed for myself where I would draw an imaginary forcefield around all the people I loved and essentially cast a spell to stop evil from hunting them.
What makes you laugh (feel free to share any videos, memes, record a
Which artist-living or dead would you like to share your quarantine practice with? Why?
Such a hard question, but I have always loved the work of Munch, the intuitive and emotional honesty and rawness coupled with his paint handling and colour choices are so truthful and moving.
Exercise 2
Place and object you want to draw in a different room to the place you are drawing. Go and study the object and then go back to the other room to draw it. You can revisit the objects as many times as you need to but it must remain in a separate room from you whilst drawing. ( A memory test)
We are probably going to get through a lot of these homework sheets - so
We are putting together a mixtape - what’s your go to song for dancing ?
being in the studio ?
Opening March - Billy Butheel
chilling out ?
Sitting on the Dock of a Bay - Otis Reading
falling in love ?
You and Me Song - The Wannadies
For Exercise Three, we ask our artists to pick one of the following subjects as a starting point to make some work using an A5 piece of paper/cloth/whatever you like to the size with no restriction on media. These will be published on our website and available for £110 each.
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Still life: pick 3 items from your surrounding and recreate them
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Draw the last text you received/Page 15 from a book you are currently reading 7th sentence down
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Draw the last exhibition you saw/in style of the last exhibition you saw
Check out Rhiannon's exercise three piece here
