Where did the idea come from?
The seed of the idea was planted back in 2017 after I watched a film called ‘Dave Made A Maze’ about a guy called Dave who builds a maze in his living room and then gets lost in it. I loved building dens and forts as a kid and the idea of building some kind of structure in the living room really appealed to me. (I just couldn’t figure out how to get away with doing it as an adult! LOL). But what it did do was spark an interest in the idea of a space within a space and how an individual might react to that.
I then read Mark Z Danielewski’s ‘House of Leaves’ (HOL) and was especially fascinated by ‘The Navidson Record’ section of the multi-faceted tale. (If you decide to go down the rabbit hole and read this, I feel I should warn you that it is a marmite book - those that love it REALLY love it and those that hate it REALLY hate it!). Anyway, the Navidson Record documents unusual activity within the Navidson home. Doors appear in once-blank walls of their house, opening onto new rooms that extended, impossibly, beyond the house's outside dimensions. As the characters move further into the newly created spaces, how they experience, and react to, that space varies based on their particular characteristics and the space then reacts to them. One of the main themes is about the unsettling nature of fear but also about how that fear can be overcome. (As you can see from the pictures above, space also plays a part in the layout of the book too!).
That then lead me to ‘The Poetics Of Space’ by Gaston Bachelard and it was within those pages that the seed of the resiDENcy really started to grow. The book discusses the interaction between physical space, consciousness and poetics. For Bachelard the house is of particular importance and he examines it ‘from Cellar to Garret’. He looks at the significance of the hut, explores attics, spends time in murky basements and even considers the joy of a dusty corner! The book discusses memory, dreams, imagination and touches on a lot of the themes contained within HOL. It got me thinking back to that little girl who, untroubled by worry or doubt, loved to build a den in her living room and then spend hours in it drawing and painting.
In saying all that, the real catalyst for the project came in the form of the Momentum Course run by the wonderful people over at The Visual Artists Association (VAA). (If you are not a member, I suggest you look at the benefits and consider joining!). I undertook the course in November 2023 and it was a game changer. The VAA Momentum is an accelerator course for artists which provides them with the knowledge and practicalities to enable them to successfully grow their business. We looked at my business strategy, did a gap analysis (I may still have some implementing to do on that clears throat and looks a bit furtive), examined different streams of income and discussed contemporary approaches to developing projects. It was the latter section that really jumped out at me! It had never occurred to me that I could create my own residency and suddenly all those ideas about mazes and dens and all that reading came together in one moment. When I said ‘I want to build a DEN in my studio. I want to see what I can create when I have a safe space to unleash my inner 5 year old. I want to use it to challenge my self doubt’ my mentor said ‘You’re going to create a resiDENcy’.
We’ve been planning it ever since….and I still wish I had come up with the title! Lol.
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