Starting at the Green Patch

I start my residency at the Green Patch community allotments in Kettering on Monday.

It's a beautiful site.  Artist Carole Miles and I will be working in the summer house which we put up on Friday. Nestled into a corner of what is the newly planted orchard, our new base already looks quite at home!

It couldn't have come at a better time. Both Carole and I had to move out of our studios in Corby this month, where we have been for 6 years. We could have felt a little lost after all the disruption that has caused. The studios have been a mixed blessing for over that time: a fantastic large space each in our own building with twenty four hour access, yet the building has gradually been deteriorating and the owners have given it little attention, and eventually started to use the central room as a storage area, which was beginning to make us feel unwelcome. Being there has also resulted in Carole and I nurturing our collaborative practice, which could have come adrift once we no longer had a shared building.

So when, only a week after we finally vacated the last items from our old studio spaces, we moved into our collaborative residency at the Green Patch, the move felt positive rather than a wrench. We both feel really excited about this project and the people at the Green Patch seem excited too, making us feel very welcome to invade their space!

We will be working fairly intensely at the allotments for the first two weeks, welcoming local people to come and join us in creating things as well as making our own work inspired by the site. The intention is to create work for the site itself, and for the summer house, which will remain there after we have gone. We will stay in residence for a while longer, into September, and hope to have a celebratory event to finish.

What we will make is very open at this point. We want our work to be in response to the site itself and let it direct our work, so we didn't want to have any preconceived ideas. It will be interesting to see how things unfold; Carole and I are quite different as artists, but we have crossovers of interests and we seem to work well together, so who knows what this three-way collaboration will result in - three ways being me, Carole and the Green Patch itself!

We will be blogging regularly on our collaborative project blog at undiscoverednetworks.blogspot.com so please visit us there.