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Photo: Sarah Owen
"The Pasta Dance"
Tancha Dirickson, "The Pasta Dance," 2012, relational art event in Montefioralle, Italy.
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"Surfacing 2"
Liz Ingram and Bernd Hildebrandt, "Surfacing 2," 2013, dye sublimation prints on polyester fabric, Mono banner system hardware, 28.5’ x 6.6’ (installed at Schwabenakademie Irsee, Kloster Irsee, Germany).
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Photo: Laura Vickerson
"Trône"
Laura Vickerson, "Trône," 2009, velvet and upholstery fabric on holly stump at Château Mathieu, France.
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Photo: Sarah Owen
"The Pasta Dance"
Tancha Dirickson, "The Pasta Dance," 2012, relational art event in Montefioralle, Italy.
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Photo: Laura Vickerson
"German Door"
Walter May, "German Door," 2009, wood, wooden handles and cord, installation view at Château Mathieu, France.
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Photo: Greg Payce
"Oculus"
Greg Payce, "Oculus," 2009, flies and glue on glass window pane at Château Mathieu, France.
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Photo: M. N. Hutchinson
"Plant specimens collected in the 1940s by amateur botanist Jacques Henry"
Plant specimens collected in the 1940s by amateur botanist Jacques Henry were installed by Gloria Mok in the salon of Château Mathieu, France, in 2009.
GO GLOBAL: Western Canadian Artists find inspiration at foreign residencies
By Portia Priegert
For a group of Alberta artists, it was an intriguing opportunity to explore France’s turbulent history through the lens of a centuries-old Normandy chateau. “You felt like you were waking up in a different time,” says Diana Sherlock, describing the cooing pigeons and stately gardens outside the chateau where she spent a two-week residency. Built before the French Revolution, and variously occupied by generals Montgomery and Rommel during the Second World War, the place was like the set of a period movie. “It was quite a magical experience,” she says. It was also productive. The five artists who joined her – Gloria Mok, Laura Vickerson, Marc Hutchinson, Greg Payce and Walter May – produced a range of fascinating work they continued to explore when they returned home. Sherlock, a writer and curator, organized it into an exhibition, Folly: Château Mathieu, that’s showing at the University of Calgary’s Nickle Galleries from Jan. 24 to April 5.
France is just one of the many countries where Western Canadian artists have done residencies in recent years. A surprising number of creative people are taking advantage of burgeoning opportunities, spending time everywhere from Iceland and China to Australia and South Africa. While prominent artists are sometimes invited to residencies organized by leading cultural institutions that pay fees, produce exhibitions and publish catalogues, artists at all stages of their careers can find opportunities – whether through open calls at small, community-based programs where they might be billeted in private homes, or by paying their own way at facilities run on a fee-for-service basis. Some residencies provide state-of-the-art equipment and access to leading artists or critics. At others, participants work in more spartan surroundings and, when done, simply bundle up their creations and take them home.
The most important things residencies offer are also the most basic and, often, the hardest for artists to find: Time and space. Away from daily responsibilities – whether jobs, housework or parenting – artists have the freedom to think, research and create. While residencies in Canada can also fit that bill, foreign programs have an added cachet – cultural exchange. Travel is always enriching, but an international residency is like language immersion, letting artists plunge into an alien environment for an intense period of work. Exposure to different ideas and ways of making art can lead to creative breakthroughs or even shift practices in entirely new directions. Of course, part of the appeal is also social. Residencies are renowned for sparking intense conversations and creative exchanges that can lead to collaborations and new friendships. Usually, artists come home feeling rejuvenated and inspired.
Some residencies are DIY affairs. The Folly project, for instance, developed organically after Mok mentioned to a friend that her husband’s family owned a chateau and was open to having artists work there. Eventually, a loose collective coalesced. From the start, the residency was treated as an opportunity for exploration. “It allows you to be more open to what you experience in a place and take a lot more risk,” says Sherlock.
Vickerson, for example, installed textiles inside the chateau as she thought about the generations of women who had lived there. But other ideas soon emerged. As she explains in her artist statement, she took antique fabric adorned with flowers and plants out one day to a meadow where some sheep were grazing. “There I looked at the centuries-old majestic trees, and began my foray into exterior decorating.” Mok, an Edmonton doctor, was entranced by early botanists who had lived at the chateau, and decided to work on a series of mixed-media collages. Hutchinson performed in his own Second World War spy thriller, which he documented in a photographic series, The Incident at Normandy. Payce’s lenticular series was inspired by the Enlightenment, while May began assembling sculptural pieces from branches, cord and wooden handles.
The Folly participants have established practices – Payce even picked up a Governor General’s award last year – but residencies also attract emerging artists. Tancha Dirickson, who recently completed her MFA at the University of British Columbia, ended up on the streets of Tuscany in 2012, leading a carnivalesque dance with elaborate masks made from pasta, part of her ongoing work about food sustainability. “My experience was a very inspiring and productive one,” says Dirickson, who grew up in Brazil. “The support I received … was, in fact, amazing.”
Another artist, Liz Ingram, a professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, spent 10 days last summer at a former monastery in Bavaria, where she led a master class in printmaking and created a collaborative installation with her husband, Bernd Hildebrandt. The work, printed on polyester fabric and designed to hang like a banner from an ornate painting on the ceiling, shows serial images of Hildebrandt floating in a stream. “This residency was an amazing experience and highly stimulating for my future work,” says Ingram, who also spent three weeks in Berlin, working on a book project. “Being in such a baroque setting helped me to understand more fully the baroque influences on my own work.”
These days, it’s easy to find residencies. Most programs have websites, and Res Artis, a worldwide residency network based in the Netherlands, has an online database that offers hundreds of options in some 70 countries. Listings range from a textile program in Mexico to one for socially engaged art in Armenia.
For Canadians, some of the most coveted residencies are at studios operated by the Canada Council for the Arts in Paris, Berlin and London. Designed, in part, to raise the international profile of Canadian artists, they come with stipends to cover travel, production costs and basic living expenses.
While residencies are enjoying new popularity, they’ve been around for a while. Some programs in Europe and the United States, such as Yaddo, a sought-after New York retreat for writers and artists, date back more than a century. Artist residencies drew renewed interest in the 1960s. But it’s the emergence of globalization that’s most often cited as the reason behind the many new international programs. As people, capital and consumer goods swirl around the world at a dizzying pace, it’s only natural that artists want to get into the act. It’s hard to see much folly in that.
