By Tatiana Delaunay – Central Saint Martins’
BA Performance, Design & Practice Alumni
Image: ‘Attempts to put a circle in a square’ – drawing, Tatiana Delaunay, 2018
The Art for the Environment International Artist Residency Programme (AER) was launched in 2015 by member of the UAL Research Centre for Sustainable Fashion (CSF) and UAL Chair of Art and the Environment Professor Lucy Orta and coordinated by CSF Associate Curator Camilla Palestra.
Tatiana Delaunay – Central Saint Martins’ BA Performance, Design & Practice Alumni was been selected for this years’ AER 2018 Residency at Hauser & Wirth (Somerset).
Here we share Tatiana ’s residency report.
Report – Art for the Environment residency, Hauser & Wirth (Somerset)
12 February – 12 March 2018
A lady at the grocers looked successfully at me and the carrots, and, pointing at the carrots: ‘they are beautiful aren’t they?’ This is a little pleasure one experiences whilst staying in a small village of the West Country. It is at the grocer’s also that I discovered about snowdrops, wild flowers that I had never encountered before, a little mocked by my interlocutors for not knowing. ‘What can I do? I was born in Paris.’
My time in residency was punctuated by walks, morning walks, most of the times, looking and picking. I picked up a salad, once, on the pathway to the gallery, across fields and communal allotments. At noon it was on my desk in the gallery, on my plate later in the day.
I became interested in the rhythmic qualities of the walks, the spontaneous synchronicity between my steps, my breaths, the attributes of the soil – muddy, mushy, grassy; and the encounters made across fields. One of them, a little dog called Logan, and his owner, the head gardener of the farm, who magically appeared in the snow as I was looking to meet her for the past couple of weeks. She had outdoors hands, hands which looked like they were being used for their function. I looked down at mines, tiny, pale, computer hands in comparison. She told me how she sees her cows everyday to make sure they have dry hay to lie on for the night. I imagined the scene with tenderness.
Many people and stories, the glimpses of which I caught between a question and another, behind my desk in the gallery space where my residency was based. Gallery-goers, farmers, locals and London weekenders all at once. A woman told me about her five sheep pets and their idiosyncrasies, how one of them always comes last in the group when called, always a bit dazed, or grumpy, or both; while her friend was miming behind her ‘she’s bonkers’. They both left in a laugh. Another told me about her joy to live amongst the green whilst still having a ‘pantry’ (a somewhere to go, one never knows, the proximity to London).
The constant public outlook of my stay turned into a contemplative one, waiting to be approached and asked whether I could kindly indicate the restrooms, and slowly allowing the conversation to unravel. I learnt that one can become attached to the soil in which one’s hands have been working daily, that it can be said ‘I don’t miss the place that much, just the soil’.
I was late on my first day, as everyone working at the gallery who I have spoken to. Naively putting on a nice pair of shoes I arrived with mud up to my ankles, retrospectively understanding the function of the many pairs of welly-boots lining up the entrance hall of my accommodation. So has everyone else, a pair of suede high-heeled ankle boots has perished from ignorance. Everyday from then on, I would put the welly boots on and feel invincible, for the time of a cloudy walk.
Those walks inspired a series of talks and readings shared with the audience, taking place in the gallery space. My research about snowdrops led me once again to Hans Christian Andersen, as it previously has in my work with the same spontaneity. As expressed in my initial proposal, I took with me a small snow globe bought in Paris. The snow globe perpetuates the illusion of an immutable reality separate from us and only accessible, we believe, in a romanticised idea. The snow globe appears to me as a vain attempt to control external phenomena over which we have no power – metaphorically, the weather, or snow. The snowdrop on the other hand, a fragile miracle, makes its way through external hindrances: spring is a mindset.
Image: ‘Logan’ Tatiana Delaunay, 2018
The exhibition I was located in seemed like a mirror of the attempts the gallery is undertaking. Bridging farming and artistic practices, creating relations. The farm is wishing to follow the model of holistic farm management, whose main technique has been described as ‘mimicking nature’. Particularly with the current showing, The Land We Live In, The Land We Left Behind, this research is now nestled in the exhibition space.
What pointed me towards a connection to the land was the people who abide on it. One of the workers at the local organic cheese-maker told that the farm owns 280 cows, initially raised in groups of five or six, all by the same man, then brought together to the main herd, so as to have a group they are familiar with. It reminded me of my first back-to-school season and how intimidated I was, grateful to have a few friends already. More sweetness.
I found everywhere artists in disguise. I saw artists farming, invigilating, shop keeping, cow-caring. I enjoyed conceiving art as no other than performing an action with a creative mind.
Some time ago whilst completing tax forms a section surprised me, stayed with me for a long time. In the mind of tax assessors the link between land and artistic creation seems pretty obvious. Perhaps are they precursors in the belief that all things are interconnected – or perhaps, for the first time, I was then able to see the poetry of Revenue & Customs. I was completing taxes with a joyful smile and the feeling that I had ticked the correct box.
“Taxes for self-assessment I am a farmer, market gardener or a creator of literary or artistic works and I wish to claim averaging adjustment.”
Parts of Tatiana Delaunay’s video and sound research, ‘Attempts to put a circle in a square’ can be found on her website: tatianadelaunay.com
More about the AER Programme:
Applications accepted from UAL graduates, postgraduates and recent alumni (within 12 months from graduation date).
The Art for the Environment International Artist Residency Programme (AER) was launched in 2015 by member of the UAL Research Centre for Sustainable Fashion and UAL Chair of Art and the Environment Professor Lucy Orta.
AER provides UAL graduates with the exceptional opportunity to apply for a 2 to 4-week residency at one of our internationally renowned host institutions, to explore concerns that define the 21st century – biodiversity, environmental sustainability, social economy, and human rights.
Through research, studio practice, critiques and mentoring the AER programme is designed to envision a world of tomorrow; to imagine and create work that challenges how we interact with the environment and each other.
NOTE: These residencies cannot accommodate collective applications, only single applicants accepted.
Residencies are being added to the AER Programme all of the time, click here to find out more