Wow. I am now back a day or so from my 2 weeks spent at an artist’s residency in Italy. Why wow? Well because the experience was so stuffed full of opportunities to stop and consider my practice as well as to create work in a very different environment, to work with new people, to listen to their views on my work and to provide feedback to them and to explore new ideas. I deliberately went into residency with a blank page and no set ideas on what I wanted to achieve. I thought I would see how the place and the experience inspired me.

Even getting to the location at Collemaccia was long and difficult. I took 3 buses before I even left Scotland starting at Midnight the night before to reach Edinburgh airport for my early flight. Then the flight to Italy, another bus to the railway station in Rome, a train to the local town and then a taxi to the residency location. I worked it out that I travelled almost 1,400 miles which took just under 15 hours. That time seemed to build expectations in me but also started a process of emptying my mind of all the normal day-to-day things on the go at home.

I will begin with my initial thoughts on the layout of the village and of the studio and living spaces within the village. There were two houses with 3 bedrooms in each. The biggest house had studio space on the roof and in the basement. My own smaller house had desks in my bedroom and we had dining table which was bright and airy. I was initially surprised that so much of what I did was based on building relationships and finding humour and establishing trust. Finding people with similar touch points and common experiences and seeing how they worked and how we got on with living in close confines.  There was just one person from New York who seemed to have issues fitting in and caused arguments. This is maybe true of life as it is of residencies. Luckily the second house gave me and a Dutchman who were assigned there a bolt hole when things got too heated and argumentative. There were arguments over people wearing perfume (yes really), what products they were using in the art practice (because it might smell), over what food to eat, over paying for food and over who was cooking, tidying up and putting out recycling. I found in the heat I wasn’t eating too much and was happy in first week to retreat to my space and work alone. Maybe this just what am used to with distance learning with the OCA. After 10 days or so my eyes started to play up, I think because of my diabetes and it became harder to see but even this challenge presented me with new ways of thinking, excuses to watch others working and to offer feedback and to engage with another artist on collaborative pieces. Many of people there had experienced loss and so was interesting to tell and to listen to some of our background and why we were there and at how our experiences of loss impacted our current work. After a week we gave a presentation on our work which was nice chance to get some more formal feedback. As residency had many people with Masters, full or assistant Professorships or doctorates, it was interesting finding my place. I enjoyed how everyone fitted in (bar one) and there were no airs and graces. That one person suggested that the curator Tracy Mackenna should be more selective when accepting applications to exclude people who ‘didn’t measure up’ said it all. The feedback I received was very interesting and I have a series of books and references to look up as well as contact details for new network of people as we were interested in one another’s work. Similarly when I offered feedback it was well received. Am told that new arrivals since I left present new challenges. Against, maybe this is a normal part of residency life.

I found that a large part of what I did there could be described as collecting. I collected a large number of things I took pictures of, I collected experiences, I explored the village, the surrounding hills where I found a ruined ossuary and chapel. I found out some of the history of the place, of the German SS headquartered in the village during WW2 and more. I found some old fragments of tile used as landfill and a poster advertising the celebration of a local man’s life. Some of these ideas and pictures I used during the residency to create test pieces, some I have taken home and will reflect and think about how I could use these works or the ideas behind these in the future.  The references I collected I will look through. I didn’t do too much reading when I was there as my eyes not the best.

I will show some of the work I created and why along with the images of ossuary and chapel which had great meaning for me even if I don’t know what to do with my photographs of these.

Althought landscape photography isn’t something I often shoot, I took some shots from days I spent walking in the local hills. Each image been stitched together to present a wide view. In the first of these, I thought of the local properties some of which is falling down. In particular I thought of fragments of fresco which I saw crumbling from a ceiling and landing on the grown.What was previously a view of cherubs or the sky was now at my feet. I cut the landscape and then re-assmbled the fragments with some of the sky at the bottom trying to question why everything must be in a specific order. In my next test piece I explored colour and toning. In my own project I had feedback from OCA students that they felt differently about an image I presented because it was on a green background. This landscape I again played with colour trying to create the sense of this view from long ago and to imagine an earlier phoitographer in these hills and of the local people walking these hills in the past.

In my walk in hills, I found some wells, some of which dates back to Roman times. The local famer had brought old bathtubs into the hilsl which he filled with water for his cows. The central photograph in this piece shows the leaves, animal footprints, muck and the marks on the inside of the bath along with reflections through the trees to the sky. I loved abstract feel of this but for a long time didn’t know what to do with it. This work tries to explore concept of what lies within and what is outside. The coloured rectangles represent windows which represent different opinions and viewpoints presented as if a frame of film.

I visited a local todan and saw a billboard where someone had placed some kind of sticky pad over the model’s mouth. I photographed this as wanted to rework the billboard to comment on whoever tried to take away her voice. I changed the text for whatever was being advertised so it simply read Sshhh.

In these two works I used Max and Kathe from my own photo archive purchased, or perhaps rescued, online. Max and Kathe are 2 German children from the 1930s. I tought it was interesting to experiment with placement of the children in an Italian village occupied by German troops.I used the dark doorways of abandoned propertied of the shadows from a low sun and thought about opacity. I wondered as I show these if they represent my view on hauntology, less about what I would regard as ghostly aparitions but more about the hidden memories of this place.

This piece used a poster I found which had advertised a celebration of the life of a local man who had died very young. I loved the way the paper had started to deteriorate and that his face was missing. This made me think of the way we forget what the dead look and sound like. I created a small shrine to this man using fragments of floor tile I found which were used as landfill on local cycle path. Even this man’s full name is missing and only a fragment was left with the poster.

The final work I show in this collection is from another of the abandoned buildings in the vollage. This particular doorway is the basement of ahouse. The open panel in thie door is laced with rope and cobwebs. I took a shot of a local roadway shrine and cut a fragment of the baby Jesus which I used in this cobweb. I wanted this to appear like a kind of stained glass window. I loved that the child had a small chip in his eye which seemed to fit this piece very well. It spoke to me of decay but of precious things surviving in teh way that fragments of memory return to us if we head a certain noise or smell something which triggers another thought.

The final piece I wanted to show is a video piece which was a collaborative effort with David D’Agostino from Albuquerque in the US. David was interested, like me, in the history of this village and its surroundings. David mixed non-toxic paints from local sources. He painted linen with his paints then made imprints of the ground. The particular piece below is an imprint outside a house which during WW2 was the SS Headquarters in this region. We spoke about his work and David valued my input as a photographer.To the static idea of the linen I added movement from the breeze and the shadow of a wire fence next to this building. As David said to me, “I enjoyed your perspective on the work and what was revealed beyond my intentions.” We made other work together when David was photographing rocks gathered locally which he placed on his printed linen and then poured water into a tub containing linen and rock. David commented that teh water disappeared as he photographed it so I suggested we reshoot the video but with the water moving so that it caught the light. This produced a surreal effect that the rock appeared to float. David has the footage of these works so will be interesting to see it again at some point in the future.

There was another piece I produced as part of this shared work. In this I focussed in on the fringe as has been thinking about borders and edges and how this edge of memory and the past related to how we remembered and forget. This idea is related to my work on the memorial with tiles and the decaying image.

This collaborative work with David might well continue. Since he gone home to New Mexico he been in touch to ask if I’d be interested in working together some more. This time would be very different to our work in Italy, slower paced as would take place via email or Whatsapp.Will be interesting to see what comes of it.

In summary, the residency was exciting, busy, hot with its challenges and with successes. My work above wasn’t necessarily closely related to my OCA Major Project but it felt right for that place and time. Would I do it again? Absolutely but I will need a period of time to reflect and process what I did there and the experience as a whole.I have applied for a grant for the residency but as the rules of this funding mean I not allowed to apply retrospeciviely. I might need to return to Collemacchia. It might be interesting to see it into autumn away from the full heat of the summer sun.

A few thoughts on my health. Firstly, the 2 weeks in the heat have really helped my breathing and chest and I stopped puffing and panting and was able to walk much further. This made me think of people in the days of TB who, if they could afford it, left the polluted and damp parts of Scotland to come where air was cleaner and drier. On my eyesight, since I have come home I have spoken with diabetes nurse and have appointment at hospital for end of the month. I also went to see an optometrist who took all sorts of images of the back of my eye and of my lens and peripheral vision. She concluded that my reading vision which I used to use a 1.0 in reading glasses had shifted to a 4.5 while at same time my long vision moved from not wearing any glasses to a 2.5 / 2.75. These changes had happened so suddenly that she had no obvious explanation and will speak with colleagues and have me in for further tests in a few weeks. I ordered some cheap reading glasses to allow me to work and type of the computer while my eyes sort themselves out. Oh and stop the press. Today (Sunday) I tested positive for Covid. So health wise I have some challenges.