Imagine inviting yourself into someone’s home. Even better, how about someone’s office, the place where they work, think and create. A secret den, a place where the magic happens. What would you find and discover? What would they reveal?
Just think for a moment about where you do your best writing. Is it wherever the laptop is, or do you have a space where you lock yourself away, with music or silence, images or books, a monk’s cell or a hoarder’s paradise? And then imagine someone visiting you to absorb a flavour of that.
Our journey involved 20 writers meeting 20 print makers at their place of work. In this third partnership between 26 and Eames Fine Art, our writers ventured into studios and backrooms, offices and spare bedrooms from New Zealand to Bristol, Faversham to Aberdeen via Madrid and the bright lights of London. The results will be revealed in several ways over the coming months.
What we’re heading toward is the launch of our collaboration at Eames Fine Art Gallery on 1st May where we’ll be showing the extent of the collaboration – a Sestude and a longer diary piece from each writer, and a film pieced together by the superb Mike Southon, someone well-known to Eames and 26 from previous partnerships.
I visited Suki Hayes-Watkins, a master print-maker which means she makes prints for other artists. Her studio is a converted chicken shed overlooking the flat Kentish marshes bordering the Thames Estuary. From this Dickensian vantage point (in a certain light I imagined this could be the opening scene from Great Expectations), she was putting the finishing touches to a run of Mychael Barrett’s work, a print-maker also featured in the collaborations. Layers of painstakingly precise colours were being laid one on top of the other. She had designed the rhythm of the colours, in the middle of which gold leaf was called for (that’s when I arrived). She talked me through her process, a one-on-one masterclass. As a way in to another artistic world, it was priceless.
– Alastair Creamer
Photo: Suki Hayes-Watkins, Hinterland.