Method for creativity

Still Breath

Breathe
and practice what you love
You don't have to plan to achieve
You don't have to achieve to succeed
But you might be surprised by what becomes...

Jay Dee Dearness is an artist and printmaker who came for a residency over August/ September 2010. She came bustling with ideas and plans. Perhaps we slowed her down, introduced her to place, reminded her to breathe. Yet, by the end of the first day she had set up the studio, taken pinhole digital camera images, and was already printing. She was inspired: by a beautiful curved open prickly crows ash seed that we gave her, by the evening sunsets that we watched from our outside stage, and by her small straw bale guest house, made of re-used materials borrowed from no longer wanted places.

We did easy yoga in the early morning, ate meals together, and watched the sun set. Inbetween these markers, Jay Dee worked hard: experimenting with new print forms, with dyes from the place’s plants (nasturtium worked best), and with various forms of photography, cutting and testing prints, and drawing for days looking out across the valley to the mountain beyond. This commitment paid off in some glorious product (even as we assured Jay Dee this was not the necessary outcome of a residency in this place). At the end of her residency, we held a small exhibition of her work – she brought the champagne, we made the cheese straws!

Her work marvellously captures her sense of this place – images of guest studio, sunset, scenery, and seed all layered into small printed square tiles on thick creamy papers. Blacks and whites enhanced by careful hints and tones of colour. While each small print offered a whole story and aesthetic, their mosaic into two much bigger works turned them into works of art worthy of any gallery wall. Here is a repeated story, each tale using its same components differently, that reflect ideas of ecology – each piece of nature holds the story of the whole, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The final layout of these small prints tells a gentle story of love of place; it tells about the first steps we make in reconnecting with land, and about the generosity of spirit that lies in creative endeavour. Jay Dee’s work (and indeed residency) took away our breath and then gave us back a sense of both the complex and the simple, the natural and the made, the ugly and the beautiful. In conflating these dualisms, Jay Dee’s work has shown us another way we might each live in the micro-local. It is called The Gift. And we thank her for it.

All of The Gift can be viewed on Jay Dee's Flicker collection The Gift