Reporting
Baie Sainte Marie Artist and Family Residency
At the Jenny Family Compound
New Edinbugh, Nova Scotia
Reporting Form
Name: Jessica George
Graduation Year: 2009
Major: MFA
- Provide a summary of your residency and how you benefited from this experience in no more than two pages.
To summarize our residency would be to start with the our arrival at the Jenny compound. We cleaned the barns in order to make work space for ourselves. This included the removal of old insulation in which there were animals living and thoroughly cleaning and re-arranging the pre-existing space in order to have space to work in. Once we were settled in, dealt with the fact there were limited light sources and laid our materials out we began to get right into our work. Individually I created three different series of paintings. One of which was a 24 piece boxed set that I did not complete in our two weeks time. One larger (yet small enough to be transported safely wet) set of 6 at 10”x10” I did complete, and another set of 5 of a similar size is still in progress. As a painter who works in response to the land’s qualities I noted that in such a short period of time, in a place so desolate (two weeks being short in the great scheme of things) I did not fully internalize all that was alive and well in that place. I mostly responded to the brief yet note worthy encounters we had by weaving together symbols of a memory and or a representational landscape site. Some of these layers include: A bunny we saw every morning, the guard rail across the street cutting through the view to the other side of the bay. A raccoon skull Cole found on the beach, wet blotches deposited on my paintings as I left them outside in the fog, Acadian radio describing the journey of three astronauts in French, cows living down the street, the barn’s texture and color, clapboards of the house, cement well cap, design we found repeatedly on rocks etc.
Collaboratively, I work with Cole consistently. To include a third party in our collaborations was an interesting task. Devin happily participated in the activities we typically do at our home on Peaks Island. Walking the beach, combing it for any sign of interest. This led to our joining our beach treasures and ordering it into multiple patterns of logic. Organized sometimes by color, size, or at other times a more remote mapping pattern would emerge to display new connection points. The results were beautiful compositions of shape, size and color. Conceptual painterly photographs.
The final night of our residency we cleaned the smaller, cleaner, blue barn (Devin’s studio) in order to set the work we had done over the two weeks up in a gallery setting. We arranged a table of cheese, crackers and wine and decked the space out in a fashion where people could mingle and look around at the work. There was a great turn out in response to our cyanotype invitations made as a collaboration between Cole and myself (Cole produced the glass plate which I used to print the invites.) People were very appreciative of our appreciation of their place in the world. It was a great evening with lots of generosity and conversation.
