It may be absolutely wet and wild out there, kinda batten down the hatches type of weather but I feel so excited and so ready for this day, a day that has been in the planning for months now. You see I’m about to begin a two week self-directed artist residency based in Pimlico, London, right slap bang opposite the Battersea Power Station, ha, more energy, even if it’s in a symbolic sense, as the only power passing through there these days is the power of capitalism.
I’ll be staying in my fabulous friend’s flat. She has super kindly let me use her home for the next two weeks she’ll be away. When she told me earlier in the year that she’d be going on a wonderful trip abroad my brain started ticking, it seemed too good an opportunity to miss up on; an empty flat in central London sitting there doing nothing for two weeks! So I put the idea to her and being the kind hearted generous soul that she is, and because she loves me, she said yes.
I’d need to create a framework for the residency and put a plan in place that considered my hopes and desires, and to ask myself pertinent questions such as ‘what am I doing here?, why have I come?, what are my expectations and hopes around the outcome? and how will I manage if none of the answers work out?’ I also needed to contemplate if I wanted to stay for the whole two weeks or perhaps just a portion of that time and then commit to the process, to the residency, regardless. I also needed to think about any restrictions that I might want to impose, part of the framework to work within. And of course, most importantly, what the driving force of the residency would be for me, why do it?
The more I’ve been engaged in my artistic process these past two years the more apparent it’s become that I have a need to map. There’s this repetitive call inside of me to map my existence. There’s so much evidence in the footprints I’ve been creating, like Someone’s Chair Snapshots – Looking for My Brother, for example, The Ladder of Abuse – part of the Minimising Series, my Text Based Posters that map my journey of self-exploration, healing and self-actualisation, and what about all those bottles of fine golden sand that I collected from the pristine beaches of northwestern Spain, each one, like all of my works, dated and arranged chronologically. Even from my brother’s bench on Hampstead Heath I look out and mentally document my life, so much of it laid before me and that links with my Everywhere I’ve Ever Lived project. There was even a day when I documented The Route, its various significant stops along the way, of the night I was taken from my home and sexually abused by a family friend. All of this documenting; documenting my existence, my experiences, my emotions, my patterns, revisiting my life. This repetitive call to map sees myself put in the picture – here I am I say, and for this next investigation it’s no different.
This exciting residency is going to take me on an exploration of mapping my existence through the 24 bus route. Yep, that’s right, I love the 24 bus route so much that I’ve planned my residency around it, about it. You see it’s a bus route that I’ve been taking since I was a little nipper, often just with my brother when we’d go visit my grandma who lived in the West End. I grew up living at the beginning of the route up round Hampstead Heath way and would you believe it, my dear friend who lives in Pimlico lives at the south end of the route, literally at the last stop. Okay, maybe it might be the first stop for her haha but for me it’ll always be the last. I’m going to have a lot of walking to do and a lot of documenting and part of that documenting will involve embracing the vulnerability within to take the bold and courageous step of really putting myself out there, because for the first time my work is going to involve interviewing the general public and the 24 bus drivers!
I really can’t wait.
Tiger.On.The.Rock 