MARI AMMAN, ANGELOT TRELEX RESIDENCY

Meditations recorded during the Trélex Residency on Insight Timer.

Please note, several of the images on this page have become fuzzy due to website formatting. If you are interested in the best quality prints or viewing the film exposures, please email me to arrange for purchasing a copy or use of the image: mariammanart@icloud.com

To describe the Trélex Residency as being unlike any other artist residency feels like pointing out how deliciously warm the sun is after a long winter, but that’s exactly what it was like to spend a month in the countryside of the Swiss-French borderland: blissfully busy in a deeply quiet flow of light.

Because I grew up in a woodland area in a farm town I tend to gravitate towards finding peace and focus working in natural surroundings. Instead of getting saddled with the social guilt of going around town, I witnessed smiling faces riding horses on my morning and evening walks. While mostly peaceful, I did have an exciting blind encounter with what sounded like two foxes within my first week. Unbeknownst to me, Switzerland has plenty of foxes!

I had promised myself to journal every day while on the residency, but what ended up happening was more productivity than I knew I was capable of. After a couple of days of introductions, I got the nudge to just put the paint to the paper, and so I was remembering how to mix colours and draw images with a brush-something I hadn’t done for almost two decades. As I settled in the lovely surroundings, and rekindled my fire-building skills, I witnessed a change in my sense of doubt and security. Doubt is really important to me in my work, and sometimes I ebb and flow between venturing out to the edges of my ideas and swirling back to the practical need to attend to subjects I have committed myself to work with-namely beauty.

During the residency, it occurred to me that the way I talk about my work may make it difficult to understand but that the encounter of the work itself is considered poetic. Hearing someone else talk about my work has always been deeply valuable, and an experience I really cherish. There is a special kind of magic in gingerly sharing an idea, to have it understood as a worthwhile endeavor. There’s a modern myth of self-confidence I wrestle with, and so I experienced a real difference in the reciprocity of attention, listening, and compassionate critique. The input from fellow residents was generative and thoughtful. We commiserated on various experiences with academia, work, and migrant living, finding ourselves every few days gathered for dinner, ridiculous hours of giggles, and hugs.

The attitude of inclusivity, sincerity, the lack of pretense or judgment tends to be rare in the world and so the residency became a place to fully embrace life and time without performance pressures.

I am only saddened I did not stay an additional week, to overlap with the incoming artists. The serendipitous nature of this residency, the timing in my life, is something I don’t think I want to even try to figure out. Serendipity, like Déjà vu, is a thematic element in my life and work as a creative maker, on a voyage of discovering some new understanding or connection I have yet to find out. As I venture out from the Angelot womb into the world as a less doubtful artist, I am fulfilled by a renewed sense of trust in the explorations I had the freedom and support to pursue during my time at the Trélex residency.

gauche på papir

Forest light/skoglys

I made a couple of rolls of film while on the residency; I’ll look forward to developing and scanning those to share with you in a future post. In the meantime, I hope you will enjoy seeing my work with gauche on black portfolio and sumi papers, the rock and yarn sculptures, and pictures of my work and thinking spaces with the beloved cat, Ghandi. You can enjoy some of the Walk Talks and songs I made for Ghandi. The photography projects I worked on will go live on my website soon. The Haiku project I started in 2015 is finally getting digitally archived and ready for exhibition proposals, and some of the paintings I made helped me to understand the material in the books by David Bachelor, which I read while on the residency. Developments to yotostudio.com were made, as well as http://veveri.co , and the first layers of artgarde.org were put into place. Having created new muscle memories for stronger cognition, I am forever grateful for this experience for clearer cognition and beautiful humane relationships, and I cannot wait to come back!