Inventing myself a residency

You can do it too...

I used to look at artists who’d done residencies and think “They’re a proper artist”. Then I heard someone say you could just invent yourself a residency. Pick a place you’re interested in and ask if you can be their resident artist or writer or dancer or researcher or whatever you are….

I always thought it would be fun to be the illustrator in residency at Transport for London’s Lost Property Office (actually I’d still love to do that). I thought I’d like to be artist in residence in a corner shop. But I wasn’t brave enough to ask. Then in 2019 I was brave enough to ask if I could be artist in residence on a research project my husband Mark was launching looking at the plastic waste catastrophe. It was agreed that I could do it as an unpaid position and I dedicated one day a week to it. I’d started having tutorials with Ness Wood from Orange Beak Studio, she’d told me that I needed to draw from life every day in order to start developing my visual voice. I thought the residency would be a brilliant opportunity to learn all about an environmental issue, improve my drawing, and also to pretend that I was a proper artist.

Over the course of a year I got to visit labs where researchers were trying to find enzymes that would break down waste plastic, I learnt about Life Cycle Assessments (that’s when you calculate the environmental impact of a product throughout its entire life), visited biodigesters, recycling centres and a historic landfill site on the banks of the Thames that because of erosion is spilling plastic from the 1960s into the river. And I drew and drew and gradually began to find my visual voice.

I wasn’t paid do this residency but there was the budget to print a publication so working with Ness and Mark we made a hybrid booklet/picture book about the life cycle of a plastic bottle. These were printed by Calverts on recycled paper with plant based inks and distributed to schools and community groups. If you’d like a copy I can send you one for free. The books are spot printed so I had to learn a whole new way of working, using colour separation to build up layers to make an image. This is how I make my picture books now. It’s incredibly laborious but it does feel right to me.

And I can highly recommend inventing yourself a residency. I’ve done it twice now, having also offered myself as sketcher-in-residence to Refugee Tales (which I’ll write about in another newsletter no doubt). Residencies are an amazing way to push yourself and get inspiration, and work as part of a team, which is a rarity in illustration. And I think now I do consider myself a “proper artist”. I think.