Islands & Time
It is amazing to me that I am already three weeks into the month long artist residency at Earthskin in New Zealand! Since packing my things into storage in Vancouver to make life as creatively exploratory and affordable as possible, I have spent time at Lake Ontario visiting family and house-sitting, attended my beloved Uncle Liam’s funeral in Ireland with my Dad, spent a whirlwind eighteen days in Gwaii Haanas and the Haida Gwaii Museum as one of three artists in residence and am now preparing an artist talk for this Sunday at Earthskin.
With the rise in rent at the ARC (Vancouver’s unique live/work artist’s studios) and my desire to continue to develop my art practice outside of painting work for commercial galleries, these residencies have been a perfect unfolding for me both professionally and emotionally. I have felt my body relax here in a way that it hasn’t in years. Emerging through exploration of the Nikau palm forest, the Gannet bird colony and Muriwai Beach, is the organic linking of new themes that began in Gwaii Haanas with already established ideas from my MFA studies in Cornwall, UK.
My art practice is evolving in unexpected ways and as a direct response to following this interdisciplinary path, I have added two new pages to the website: COLLECTIONS and EARTHWORKS. I am also building a synopsis page of the artist residencies I’ve done since 2012 to visually link these creatively intense periods that have marked significant shifts in the type of art that I make.
Next up: from October 3rd through until mid-January I will be Artist in Residence at the stunning Sitka Center for Art & Ecology (Oregon coast, USA) with several artists, poets, musicians and ecologists. To follow the day to day stream of photographs, please follow me at ‘siobhanhumstonart’ on Instagram
Meanwhile, here’s a sampling of what’s new.
Eelgrass Globe, Haida Gwaii Museum, July 2017 [Globes Earthworks page]
Tidal Marking, Haida Gwaii Museum [ Tidal Marking Earthworks page]
Kunghit Island Finds, Haida Gwaii Museum [ Kunghit Island Finds Collections page]
Ninety Gwaii Haanas Islands, Haida Gwaii Museum [not yet posted]
Never an Island, Always the Sea Rising, Earthskin New Zealand [work in progress]
Earthskin studio, work in progress
Earthskin studio, Never an Island drawings in progress