Self-granted residency

In May and June I granted myself a three week residency. Artist residencies can be excellent for rigour and focus, but they are often an impossibility for sole parents. Applying also involves a lot of paperwork, uncertainty and waiting, and contorting to fit the terms. So instead, I granted one to myself and stayed home!

Rather than writing an acquittal for a funding body, I’m answerable to my family, peers and community. So I’d like to tell you, my community, that I tried to spend the time wisely. The focus was on three things:

I developed Version 2 of a card game called Verse. The original idea, an explosion of Scissors Paper Rock, came from my youngest kid and became a family lockdown project. In Verse V2, we’ve expanded the original pack and rules of the game to become a provocation about how we weigh up unlike values, and how we make room for different voices to be heard. The game goes to print this week, and we’ll be distributing a handful of copies for testing, and to crowd-source the best rules of the game. We have a hunch that there will be legions of ways to play.

I wrote two grant applications for a new project which, if successful, will see much of 2025 devoted to exploring the use of puppetry in trauma contexts. It will be a responsive design project, working to fathom what essential qualities of character people relate to in various states of distress, and what technical traits will allow them to enter clinical settings safely. There’s an incredible line-up of collaborators on this: all fingers crossed that I’ll be able to work with them.

Photo Will Borowski

And lastly, I started a project with the highly knowledgeable Will Borowski of local company Forest Fungi, exploring the potential of growing mycelial leather for making applications. Phase one involved testing various substrates to see what the fungus prefers to grow on. We’ve barely scratched the surface but the project promises to be an exciting mix of science, hunches, process, happy accidents…. and waiting.