Residency: The Eat, Pray, Love (for artists)

In 2019, I was accepted into my very first artist residency: a month in Cassis, a small fishing village in the French Riviera. Perched between cliffs and the Mediterranean, Cassis was a place of uninterrupted focus and creative immersion. I stayed with eight artists from around the world, all of us there to escape the noise of daily life and to throw ourselves into our work.

At the time, I had only recently finished art school. My first year out of Uni had been consumed by running an artist-run gallery, supporting other people’s work rather than developing my own. Cassis was the spark that reignited my passion for my own ideas. When I returned home, I converted the garage ‘gallery’ into a studio for myself, a decision that turned out to be perfectly timed for the first Covid lockdown.

That residency became the starting point of my practice as it exists today. I had gone expecting to “make,” but what I didn’t anticipate was how much the residency would also allow me to think, question, and listen.

The Provençal motto says: “Who has seen Paris and not Cassis, has not seen anything.” For me, Cassis was not just a beautiful place, it was the beginning of claiming space for my own practice. An art residency, I’ve come to realise, is the Eat, Pray, Love experience for an artist, a chance to step away, surrender to slowness, and rediscover joy in the act of making. In the film, Elizabeth Gilbert leaves behind her familiar life to eat, pray, and love her way through Italy, India, and Bali, not just for pleasure, but to search for answers and to reinvent herself. That is what I find myself craving from another residency. I want to make a pivot in my practice, but I feel I need the time and space for that reinvention to unfold.

I had a glimpse of this recently while house-sitting. It stormed most of the week, and instead of rushing to my studio after work, I curled up with Fergus the dog in a cosy house tucked into the bush.Oddly enough, that week became one of the most inspiring I’ve had in a long time. Without the constant push of three jobs and a jammed schedule, I had time to think, to let ideas breathe.

It brought to mind a phrase from Eat, Pray, Love: Dolce far niente - the joy of doing nothing. That small pause showed me how much I long for a residency again, not as an escape, but as a deliberate journey, a space where I can reset, search, and return to my practice renewed.

I’m currently at a creative crossroads. Much of my past work has explored beauty and environmental degradation through light-based installations made from single-use plastic bottles. While these works have resonated, I feel a deep pull to move forward, from simply repurposing synthetic materials toward processes that collaborate with nature itself.

My recent work with EcoMatters, particularly in composting, has sharpened this awareness. Composting is tactile, restorative, and cyclical, it has inspired me to imagine an art practice that is nourishing and regenerative rather than extractive.

This is what I hope for in my next residency: a place where I can slow down, listen deeply, and reimagine what my practice could become when it works with, not just about, nature.