HAMPTONNE RURAL LIFE MUSEUM

CULTURAL EXCHANGE RESIDENCY

In February 2014 I took part in this residency with 6 local and 4 French artists from St Malo. Myself, painter Ian Rolls, painter Lucie Marie Holt, painter Matt Daly, jeweller Lisa Le Brocq and conceptual artist Christine Finn, Photographer Javier Belmont, Printmaker Mélanie Le Maître, painter and collage artist Valérie Dechaume and painter G-Rem. The residency was to explore the concept of the artists communicating with each other and further audiences through visual language.

We did not get off to a very good start as the poor french artists were disrupted by weather and strikes. With true grit and determination they boarded a boat to England and then back to Jersey in an epic voyage to get to Jersey. After several bonding exercises we divided into four groups "out of a hat" and I worked with local painter Matt Daly and French printer Mélanie Lemaître.

The whole group decided to root the projects in morse code and in each of our personal mantras, each group expressed this in a different way. Our group started with the premise that we are all the same but different and that through any form of communication, subtleties are lost, misunderstandings happen and yet we still do manage to communicate with each other. We took photographic portraits of ourselves which were overlaid with each other in different combinations. We had limited resources so we decided to make a projection screen from toilet paper. We stitched with red thread to represent the blood that we share, straight lines of stitching represented understanding, knotted, chaotic stitching represented misunderstanding. Helix stitches represented our shared DNA. We laid the tissue out in a random way and printed our mottos which then became broken and disjointed when we hung them. We projected the images in a morse code pulse which spelled out "Only connect" a quotation from E.M. Foster