The studio is a creative space but if this concept is expanded what form would the studio take? Is the studio, any place that enables creativity and can it become the work itself? The studio can reflect the artist and restrain the artist by its very nature. But, how does the artist’s creative space inform their art practice? And what of the virtual or conceptual studio? For this issue we went behind the scenes, to see the space that you use to create. We were especially interested if the creative space was your work and if it is an unusual setting.
These are the responses that show case the wonderful variety of “studios” and art spaces that were chosen for this months exhibition.
Artist: Rochelle Shicoff
Media: Photograph of community mural site paint setup, our outdoor studio, Florence, MA for Action: A History of Florence mural.
Instagram: @rochelleshicoff
Description: This text describes my other studio. I am also a studio painter as well as a muralist. When I go to it, it’s not always welcoming. It has no people in it but it’s not empty. The place sometimes calls to me as yearning and it can call at any time, sometimes when I’m not paying attention the longing returns. The only way I know I’m in it is when I come out.
Artist: Halyna Maystrenko-Grant
Media: Film (1min 35secs)
Instagram: @Deafslav
Description: Having auditory perception disorder, the feeling of being overwhelmed by sound is a constant challenge for me. This film piece specifically focuses on the natural sounds within a large shared studio space, which I have interpreted creatively and responded to in a conversational manner. I am interested in shedding light on and drawing importance from often ignored everyday background sound.
Artist: THE DnA FACTORY MRSS
Media: Hahnemühle Photo Rag® 308gsm - Archival Giclée [Original photograph of DnA ephemera]
Instagram: @thednafactorymrss
Description: ‘BEHOLD MAN’ a new series of prints documenting our studio of the last 23 years which we are currently in the process of losing to the asset strippers, Arch Co. These prints are an archive of the ephemera and ambience of our workplace, objects we’ve collected throughout our lives, each with a tale to tell, where we and they will end up next is in the lap of the gods!
Artist: Fred Fabre
Media: Oil artist studio
Instagram: @drawlogia
Description: My studio, facing north, serves as the perfect space for creating my oil paintings. The first photo captures where the magic unfolds. In the second, I’m engrossed in reading, researching, and reflecting on ideas. Lastly, the third photo showcases where my paintings are drying or await completion.
Artist: Adam Soper
Media: Audio recording
Instagram: @soperadam
Description: This work came at a time when I was suffering badly from RSI in my left arm and wrist, so I was forced to produce a work that didn't use my fretting hand when playing the guitar. It deliberately allows the sounds of the environment in; refusing to view the studio as a sterile environment, isolated from the outside world, but instead one that is as interconnected and influenced by it's surroundings as everything else.
Listen to the track:
Artist: Jordan Sallis
Media: Organic inks, tools and materials
Instagram: @msblackink
Description: Having a space constructed from nature based within a professional setting, acts as both a refuge and safe haven. Combining various art forms of illustrations, tools, objects and raw source materials, it lays out the physical components of creation from collecting, to processing and using. Removing the barriers of traditional installations, “My Sanctuary” encourages participation from the audience. Inviting viewers to touch objects, paint with inks, lie down and smell the natural aromas, it removes the apprehension of standing too near an artwork in such a formal setting and in turn, creates a safe space.
Artist: Lyn Hodnett
Media: Collage, mixed media and acrylic paint.
Instagram: @lynhodnett
Description: My work is about women, self portrait and Home. My studio is the attic space in my small terraced house. The stairway is small and steep, so works have to be small enough to get down narrow stairs. The room is full of portraits and self portraits. I have incorporated collaged elements, collected fragments, wood and papers, old lists and postcards found when clearing my mother’s house after her passing. Painting over old papers, postcards and collaged textures, hiding and revealing previous stories, histories/ ‘her’ stories.
Artist: Melike
Media: Photograph
Instagram: @melike.studio
Description: I'm sharing two photograph works with you. "Selfportrait23", I designed as a family portrait. Everything in the studio is a part of the family. "LightAndLines" is a study of the relationship between the form formed by the lines in the painting and the space. Both contain irony. The link I sent you is a video I created by editing my images while painting in my studio.
Artist: Rosalind Lowry
Media: Installation
Instagram: @rosalindlowry
Description: Endangered Species List 481 is an Irish Linen installation created in my studio in an old Irish Mill. The work is dedicated to the 481 animals,insects, birds and moths amongst others on the red list of species and the final linen work was installed temporarily at Parliament Buildings in Belfast. Now, Endangered Species List 481 is being watched over by a series Victorian female prisoners who were jailed for minor crimes in Irish prisons. I installed this photographic work in Belfast Prison, and the women now have a permanent home in my studio.
Artist: Lior Locher
Media: Mixed media collage and linoprint
Instagram: @liorlocher
Description: I live, work my day job and make art all from one tiny room. Switching between tasks is always a complex 3D tetris puzzle, and at night I need to make space for the mattress to sleep. That is one of the reasons why I work with collage and fast-drying materials so I can pack it up at the end of the day, and why I can only work up to A3. The piece is a collage with a linocut on top, a 360 panorama view of the room and its multiple uses.
Artist: Marc Butler
Media: Mixed Media/Assemblage/Pop Art
Instagram: @Mr_marc_butler
Description: A simple cardboard box. Limitless possibilities. A creative tardis. As an art studio, a cardboard box provides ultimate flexibility- take it anywhere! As a spray paint studio, the humble, unassuming, cardboard box excels. Still utterly nondescript from the outside, peer inside- dodging the paint fumes- and a technicolour world assaults the senses. Until, of course, it starts to perish. Battered as it was by layer upon layer or neon spray paint, the sides begin to cave in- it’s structural integrity compromised beyond repair. No matter; with tomorrow comes a fresh Amazon delivery. And with it, another world of possibilities.
Artist: Nichola Rodgers
Media : mixed, found nature, drawing, performance
Instagram: @nicholarodgers.artist @nj.arts.studio
Description: The natural world has become my studio and space for inspiration and materials. Using and creating work in nature and my allotment- has turned my artwork into a space or studio that becomes part of the work as an experience - plant matter becomes art materials and performance becomes practice. Women as artist as crone as witch and healer. A symbiosis weaving within our physique. From these events I produce drawings of various types, controlled and un controlled, with tools and with body…
Image Details: Many things went missing from the shared studio monoprint, ink on Japanese mulberry paper 12.5 cm x 18.5 cm 2023
Artist: Lorraine Whelan
Media: monoprint, ink on Japanese mulberry paper
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lorraine.whelan.artist/
Description:
This is part of a series of monoprints that I have called “Lost”. This particular work refers to both the emotional and physical loss involved in sharing a particular studio space: both the loss of actual items (stolen by other occupants of the studio) and the actual loss of an artistic working space. The studio depicted in this print is one I occupied in my youth and while living in another country; the studio, for me (ie, for an artist) may also be thought of as a home and within my series of prints, a “lost” home.
Artist: Maja Spasova
Media: Installation and performance mainly in urban public space
Instagram: @art.majaspasova
Description
I constantly travel and work on many different places,. Every spot, where I can find new insights and new experiences, becomes my studio.
Often new ideas appear during sleeping, during nighttime - my bed becomes my studio then. And as I live a nomadic life, my beds are many and not only one.
In 2021 the series MY BEDS was born, an ode to the magic of sleeping, dreaming, creating. MY BEDS is a series of 10 Cyanotype images, based on photos of some of the beds, in which I've spent a night - Stockholm, London, San Francisco, Berlin, Madrid, beds in hotels, at friends' places, on the night train. MY BEDS was shown at Sundsvall Art Association and featured in several publications.
The other beloved space for creating is the street, the urban public space, where I've realized numerous projects, most recently - I HAD A DREAM LAST NIGHT in Gothenburg, Sweden, Nov 2023.
In this project four actors, equipped with headlamps and megaphones, stroll down the street and read authentic night-dreams dreamed by the people in Gothenburg. Previously to the performance, I collected the dreams, asking people in shops, libraries, train station and the like: "What did you dream last nigh?"
This project has been realized also in Stockholm 2007, New York 2016, Berlin 2022 with collected dreams from the locals, and is featured in books and radio programs.
The street in these cities was both my studio and my exhibition space!
Artist: Cynthia Harrison Orr
Media: Mixed media on paper
Instagram: @cynthiaharrisonorr
Description:
My practice shares my life, my home, it lives in me, I live in it.
This piece is a response to my life over the last six months.
Obstacles to overcome were being flooded and sharing this domestic space, my studio, with others.
Artist: Tomas Lagunavicius
Media: Digital art
Instagram: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008179871430
Description:
The modern trend to aestheticise the world extends to all aspects of human life: clothes, machines, houses, workplaces, and so on. We are shaped by various standards of what things should look like: minimalism, eclecticism and so on. But what should an artist's studio be like, where he creates art objects? If he works in a modernist way then everything should be in order, but if he is a postmodernist then everything is deconstructed, and if it is a meta-modernist studio then there could be different elements. Now let's try to imagine a futuristic art studio. Could it be like that? And what do you think?
