This is a newsletter for my paid supporters with a preview for all my subscribers. If you enjoy my writing please consider upgrading your subscription for £4/month or £40/year. These mean a lot to me as I try and maintain an independent creative life. You can cancel at any time though I always appreciate your commitment over time, as I offer mine to you. My most recent book is Weathering on geology and therapy. My first book Grounded is an illustrated guide to nature connectedness. I also have a new multi-disciplinary art chapbook called CONDUIT available now in hardcopy and digital version. Thank you for your continued support, friends. It means the world to me.
My shop is now closed while I’m away but you can support my work by grabbing a digital chapbook:
It seems a long time ago now since autumn 2025 when I was tentatively putting together an application for a multidisciplinary residency with NAHR, but now it’s summer 2026 and I am heading off to spend most of July in Italy to develop a project I’ve titled ‘Rifugio/Refuge’ in the Bergamese pre-Alpine landscape of Val Taleggio. I’m nervous, reluctant….and I can’t wait.
Back in 2024 I made a couple of applications for grants and residencies that were rejected, which I documented in this post (which is still my most popular post ever, incidentally and perhaps tellingly). They were my first and (I thought) last applications, but the rejections prompted me to create my own residency in Estonia, which proved to be incredibly fruitful and wonderful. I loved that trip and the freedom I gave myself to create a ‘programme’ exactly to my suiting. After that, I was resolved not to bother with external applications anymore, feeling that I never quite know what it is funders want or whether I’m even ‘deserving’ of a space when there are younger, struggling artists who are much more worthy, and I am doing fine as I am etc etc. But then in 2025 an online friend sent me information on a residency I’d never heard of and honestly, I couldn’t resist. It felt made for me.
Based in one of my favourite parts of the world. Tick. Geologically themed. Tick. Multidisciplinary. Tick. It even turned out my book was on the recommended reading list. BIG HUGE TICK. The residency invited projects that are made in collaboration with place, developed through walking and exploration, and allowing for what’s emergent to emerge naturally without a set outcome. This sounded just up my street after my Sicilian experience making ‘Conduit’, and off the back of my place-based years developing Weathering. Could I stretch my wings a little further?
So, I made my application to explore the project I had in mind, and found out I’d been given a place earlier this year. Then even as I was still in two minds about it (oh my poor fretting, doubting heart), in a second stroke of luck, I was awarded a small grant by the Geological Association to support development of the work. In their award letter they said we’ve never really seen anything like this before – it’s very different to the things we would usually fund – but the panel are willing to take a risk. Apparently, my application ‘without set outcomes’ created a goodly amount of debate for the scientists at the table, but in the end I assume my credibility carried me through? This meant a huge amount to me. And so I said Yes.
Refuge is a topic very close to my heart. I have been seeking it in my own personal ways, my whole life. And in my own small way, I try to provide it in my work too. Creating safe, comfortable, encouraging, growthful, healing spaces is important to me, as is seeking them for myself. I realised a long time ago, that most of my work is in some way motivated by what I wish I had had for myself, or what I have had and dearly valued.
For a few years, I have been mulling over the relationship between rest in restoration but this has naturally evolved into something else: something more foundational, and something more dynamic. Something more material and geo-logical. Something more political perhaps. What makes good shelter, and what happens within it to create safety? Where do we rest and how and with whom? What makes a place suitable for rest, respite, sanctuary? How can extracted places (outside and in) becomes places of mutual healing?
I have listening on my mind. Empathy. Refuge is such a huge word. There is a spectrum of need for it. We might not all be refugees in the most serious or acute sense of course, but we are all in some ways now (or will be) imperilled by climate collapse and political instability. There are many ways that we all need refuge and protection from day to day life (hello my neurodivergent friends!) and not just us. Animals. Plants. The abiotic. All equally. That world out there? In here? it’s not easy is it.
The project I want to develop will hopefully give some shape to how physical landscape can be a place of rifugio/refuge through the geology, architecture and dwelling places for human and non-human alike. To create places to dwell, the land is often extracted for its rock, but now how can places with a legacy of extraction be reimagined as places of refuge without need for more take. How can refuge be a softer, shape-shifting thing? Do we take it with us wherever we go? How can a concept of refuge be broadened not just as places built of stone, but as places of listening and empathy for the complex and precarious times we live in? How do we do it together?
Beneath all of that too, can I find refuge? Can I find what I’m seeking? (What am I seeking?) Can the project create space for me to unfold in safety and with some ethic of empathic care that I offer to myself in this breaking climate in this perimenopausal body? I would like the project to be an enquiry into process as much as anything (as you can imagine, because you know me and my work by now...). I have a lot of questions, and a lot of ideas, but I am trying to be relaxed about it.
Val Taleggio is a case study, but my questions travel further afield and back home to my own extracted landscape. They are tangible, literal, but also philosophical. I am still very much finding the shape and feel of the questions. I am still trying to pin down the words to say why it matters to me so much to explore this. I am at a beginning. But isn’t that the gift of a residency? I hope that that this will grow, like Weathering grew.
I will be taking a variety of materials (fabric, paper, camera etc.) but only what I can carry on foot in the mountains. Mainly I want to start a dialogue with the place through walking, spontaneous encounter and deep listening. From there I can see what happens. I would like to sit under a rock. Learn from other Fellows who will be working on their own projects at the same time. Take time to breathe. Write it down as I go.
So, this is what I’ll be doing next month (as well as pining for my pup who can’t come with me). I do hope I will still be able to write to you for most of July, and keep you updated even if it’s just to share a photo diary along the way. I hope that will be interesting, and I look forward to bringing you along…
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.