HOGCHESTER ARTS

Residency period - July  2018
 
"I picked up a stick that was shaped a little like a shepherd's crook and I held it up against the sky and up against the trees and the farmhouse in the distance, and because it was a slightly strange shape I imagined the kind of story I might begin to tell if this was indeed the discovery that led to unlocking the work I hoped to create in the coming week. But it was just a stick and I was trying too hard. Similarly the thistles were just thistles and the dead bird just a bird, the marks on the fallen tree no more than marks and each flickering idea I tried to immediately twist into exhibition-ready art was, moments later, barely an idea yet alone a work. I needed to relax a bit, experience rather than contrive. And fortunately Hogchester allows that, invites it even, in its beauty and its silences, in the rhythm and sounds of its animal lives and through the kindness of its hosts, it is a rewarding place. I spent my first day walking most of the acres there, gradually shedding expectations and learning to respond rather than impose.
 
I didn't arrive with much in the way of a plan but left with more than I expected. I'd spent hours photographing a part of a field where deer had lain, days in the studio learning tin casting, and I'd made use of the location as a base to travel further afield, photographing inside rural moorland churches (taking that trip twice on account of leaving my lens there the first time like an idiot).  It was a productive and rewarding residency leading to work that I would never have made if not for this opportunity."  Darren Harvey Regan