Sometimes, something happens which unexpectedly changes your outlook going forward.
Now that my 3 month residency at Gosforth Nature Reserve is over and the exhibition packed away, I can start to reflect on what I’ve learned from the experience. Sure, I have some new prints in my portfolio, but it’s been so much more than an opportunity to make more work.
The residency was a deliberately new way of working for me. It enabled me to truly get to know a place, to take time to sit, look and listen, to fully immerse myself without any preconception of results. I reengaged with sketching, spending more time than I have for years drawing and redrawing the views I loved. This is something I’m already taking forward into my next body of work. It also enabled me to experiment, working in a looser, freer way, revisiting monoprinting techniques I haven’t used for years and finding new ways of translating the feeling of calm I get from the landscape – the ripples on the water, the swishing swaying of the reeds.
The three prints I made, Heron’s Flight, Hide and Reeds, and Ripples at Reeds’ Edge, are 3 of my favourite views at the reserve. I hope they are recognisable to members who already know and love this place, but I also hope that to those people who don’t know it, they speak a more universal language – the simple pleasures of being in nature, watching wildlife, hearing the rippling water and the rustling of wind through branches or reeds. I hope they have a calming effect in the same way that being in the landscape itself does.
I’d like to say a huge thank you to the Natural History Society of Northumbria, for being so open to the residency proposal and for supporting me throughout. I’d also like to thank the very many members, usually photographers, who didn’t hesitate to share their knowledge with me and taught me so much about the bird life I was watching (sometimes not even noticing until it was pointed out to me!) And finally, all those people who came along, chatted to me, attended the workshops and had a go at printmaking themselves, visited the exhibition and even bought a print. It means so much to engage regularly and repeatedly with the landscape and its users, and to exhibit work in the environment which inspired it.
I’m honoured that these 3 prints and my sketchbooks, which contain many notes as well as drawings and paintings, will form a part of the North East Nature Archive. I hope that there are many more artists in residence at the reserve in the years to come, celebrating the natural cohesion of creative arts with nature.