Residency: Time, Surface, and Letting Go
Being on residency offers something that is increasingly rare in daily life — time that is not immediately directed towards outcome.
Here in Wales, away from the usual rhythms of studio visits and exhibition deadlines, I’ve been thinking about what the meadow paintings are really doing — and how they’re changing. From my desk, the mountains across the valley appear and disappear throughout the day — sometimes sharply defined, sometimes entirely absorbed by mist. That shifting reality feels very close to the way I’m thinking about painting at the moment.
The subject itself hasn’t shifted. I still feel deeply connected to the meadow as a place of immersion — somewhere to walk, return to, and look into rather than across. But I’ve become more aware that I am less interested in describing the field and more interested in recreating the experience of being within it.
That experience is unstable.
Light flares and withdraws. Depth collapses and reasserts itself. Colour overwhelms before settling. Time feels layered rather than linear. When I return to the same place across seasons and years, I’m not simply seeing it again — I’m seeing it alongside previous summers, previous versions of myself, and the memory of looking.
In the studio, this shift has become physical.
I still work on the floor. I still pour, drip and splash paint, allowing gravity and movement to interrupt intention. These gestures are not new to my practice, but I’m allowing them more space. Less correction. Less resolution. I’m noticing how often I have previously brought a painting back under control — rebalancing, refining, stabilising — and I’m beginning to question whether that instinct is always necessary.
What happens if the instability remains visible?
What happens if the painting holds more of the accident, more of the disruption, more of the moment where perception falters before it reorganises itself?
Perhaps this is what returning to the meadow really is — not repetition, but a slow unfolding of how I see.
Residency has given me the space to consider that painting is not only about capturing a place, but about tracing the act of perception itself — how we stand within colour and light, and how time folds quietly into the surface.
I don’t yet know exactly where this will lead, but I feel a subtle shift underway. Not away from the meadow, but deeper into it.
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