As part of my progress as an artist, as a way to be more outward looking from the confines of undergraduate study and to help build network of contacts to help me in the future with exhibitions or the development of my work, I decided to look for residency opportunities.
I didn’t want a general residency which on the surface had little connection with my interests but instead a residency which has much in common with my work on loss and which would be a building block for me. I realised as I started to search that in narrowing what I was looking for from the residency, I was also making the chance of finding something suitable much more difficult.
I found suitable open calls past their submission dates but no obvious residency opportunities. Eventually, I found The Museum of Loss and Renewal which is run by Tracy Mackenna and Edwin Janssen and offers individual and group residencies in Molise in Italy and in the Orkneys in Scotland.
I show some of the descriptive text of the Museum of Loss and Renewal below.
The framing of work around loss, the opportunity for collaboration and the chance of building networks with experience of presenting work to partners persuaded me to put in an application.
As I starting point, I contacted other students who I knew had successfully applied for residencies and asked for any pointers specifically around what they hoped to achieve before they applied, what they gained from experience whether expected or unexpected and any tips on the application process.
I approached the Museum of Loss and Renewal with a general query to see if they might be interested in me and after a favourable response applied on the 6th May which was accepted on the 25th May to attend from 1st to 15th July in Italy.
I received really nice feedback on my application. My work was said to be “highly engaging, as is the way I describe it.” My motivation for wanting to undertake a period of artist’s residence described as, “compelling and relevant.”
“The Museum of Loss and Renewal started in 2011 as a series of exhibitions with embedded interdisciplinary public symposia, artists’ publications and learning situations. It came into being while making work to help us understand, process and communicate the death of Edwin’s father – Wim Janssen – by assisted suicide in the Netherlands. Through artistic approaches we addressed our own, and societal attitudes towards end of life situations and issues, and to palliative care.
Tracy & Edwin explore and communicate Collemacchia’s immediate environment through e.g. drawing, collecting artefacts, photographing and filming, exhibiting, publishing, developing ‘memory maps’ (counter mapping), audio recording, engaging with local archives and collections, participating in and contributing to field-guide and interdisciplinary group walks.
They are continually presenting and testing internationally, their approaches to the relationships between art, society and audiences and they work across gallery, museum, site-specific, participatory and socially engaged practices, and commissioning. They are motivated to create connections between people, place and time, and by what happens when encounters between (creative)people and place occur. Their skills and modes of working are activated to investigate collaboration, collecting, commissioning, (imagined)futures, (layered)histories, (experimental)mapping, memory(ecological, material and ruin), recording, site(responsiveness), (intersections of)material/immaterial realms, territory, (deep)time, (shared)traditions, walking as practice and art-writing.
The Museum of Loss and Renewal’s collaborative partners include artconnexion, Danica Maier, dpr-barcelona, MAP magazine, My Bookcase, Pier Arts Centre, Studio The Future / The Future Publishing and Printing and The Walking Library.”
Even before I had been accepted for this residency, I had looked at funding options. I know that OCA offer a limited funding and I might look at that. The main organisation I approached was Creative Scotland. I initially contacted them to check whether part time students are eligible. They said that while full time students are not eligible, part-time students are as long as I can show separation between my university work and the project work for which I wish to apply for a grant. I sent in my application to Creative Scotland on the 30th May.
Having applied and been accepted for the residency and having applied for funding, my focus shifted to practical things such as looking at how to travel to the site and to what I want to achieve when I am in residence. With this second element in mind, I have searched for previous examples of artists who have been in residence at the Museum of Loss and Renewal and at their experiences.
I found a blog post from Emma Brown an illustrator and artist from Bristol. Her post is shown at following link:
https://www.a-n.co.uk/blogs/learning-and-printing/post/52565068/
Brown makes an interesting point about having unreal expectations of the residency but putting what she hoped to work on to one side she says the two weeks offered time to “make, think, read, draw” and to think about her artistic process.
Lee Hassall is another artist who took part in a residency. His work is based on landscape, time, ecology and movement. He is currently studying for his PhD at Glasgow. I was moved by his description of his work and of how he used his time in the residency and felt compelled to email Hassall to let him know how much I enjoyed his review and to ask questions about whether he had a detailed plan before the residency or if his approach was more open-ended. A link to his sense of this place is shown below:
I also found an evaluation of early iterations of projects at the Museum of Loss and Renewal on the University of Dundee website. The projects described as “Loss Becomes Object and Object Becomes Subject, focus on the interrelationships between death, memory, material culture and recycling”. I found this to be a fascinating twist on where thoughts of death and memory might lead.
There are more examples of Mackenna and Janssen’s work at link below: