The Urban Forest | carajeanflynn-MFA

'The Urban Forest' - Artist Residency and Exhibition

This residency was part of a series of 4 commissions awarded by ENAS (Essex Network of Artists’ Studios) to encourage artist collaborations. I applied with Hannah Stageman who was recommended to me by ENAS as we had similar ecological themes within our practice. We put together a proposal for the application and after the interview process we were delighted to be offered the residency.

Walking the Forest

We began the residency by walking the length of the forest (16 miles) and invited local historians and residents from the area to join us. This gave us a great insight into the forest and plenty of material to work from. We also documented the walk through photography, film and audio methods.

We based ourselves in Laughton Arts Centre which was next to the forest and gave us the opportunity to create an ongoing public display of our research.

Our starting point and proposal for the residency centred around our mutual interest in the relationship that humans have had with the forest over time, how we have used, manipulated and changed it for different purposes, how this has tried to be regulated and how it has/hasn’t benefited the community.

Experimentation

A lot of the artworks we created came from experimentation with materials, processes and colour. We talked about the colours we'd found in the forest (left by visitors), how they contrasted with the colours we expected to find, and how to use them to our advantage. We looked at colour wheels and paint charts and kept coming back to the primary colours - red, blue and yellow. There had also been discussion about fluorescent and even neon colours, so we substituted the red for pink for our cause (This also struck us as the CMYK printing colours).

Once settled we decided to flock our logs first, the idea being that flock has the same feel as moss, and so rather than just painting the logs we are assimilating them, covering their wounds with flock. We also experimented with the same colours on our photographs, testing how the colours worked and looking at distinct layers within the forest.

We wanted to record the comings and goings of people in the Forest, showing how much of a social area it actually is and decided to do this by casting sections of the Forest floor.

Collaboration

At the time of this residency I had never created work to exhibit in a gallery and by collaborating with Hannah, who exhibits regularly, meant that I could follow her lead in this area and learn from her experience. We worked well together through idea generation and experimentation and both benefited from each other’s skills and knowledge. By the end of the residency the process had progress both of our practices and pushed us to try new things and ways of working that we may not have done individually.

Final Exhibition

A few months following the residency all 8 of the commissioned artists created a group show at the Gibbard Gallery in Harlow. It was great to see the work that each pair had produced and to hear about their experiences of working together. This commission was the catalyst in the evaluation of my own practice and ultimately in my decision to apply for the MFA course.

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