Letheringham Lodge

An opportunity arose to take part in a short week long residency with  7 other artists at Letheringham Lodge in Suffolk. The brief is to make lens based work in response to either the lodge which dates back to the Medieval era or the extensive the grounds which include other buildings, fields, woods, and lakes. After projecting my work in an urban environment I have been keen to test existing work in  rural locations to see how the context may alter its reading. I am also keen to create new work in response to this environment.

Due to work work commitments I will be unable to attend for the whole week in January 2016, instead I have made an initial sight visit to gather information about the Lodge, and take some reference images I can start to work from. My initial thoughts are to make an animated projection which draws reference from the lodge and its surroundings onto any interesting spaces I find, either inside or onto the Lodge or outbuildings, or in the wooded grounds.

For the past 10 years my paintings have been completely abstract, created from compositions of shape, colour, line, and mark-making. However For this project I intend to use source material as a guide to develop my abstractions. Recently I have found my purely automatic mark-making works have started to become repetitive, without reference I have started to find it difficult to constantly reinvent or develop work and there is the danger that images can rely to heavily on the same vocabulary of cliched mark-making. By working from reference I am hoping that my mark-making and compositions will evolve and provide me with richer surface qualities.

These are a selection of the reference pictures I took, some are to remind me of spaces work could be displayed and other are reference to draw from: