Mawddach residency July 2026
In July this year I was lucky enough to spend 2 glorious weeks in Wales at the Mawddach Estuary on a residency with friend & fellow artist Sarah Roberts. We arrived on a very hot sunny Saturday & were greeted by our very friendly hosts Jake & Scarlett who have been running art residencies from their home in the Eryri National Park.
Our accommodation was the top floor of a beautiful house on Mawddach Terrace with incredible views from the studio in particular. Early mornings were spent gazing out at the soft colours over the water. I was fascinated by the changing tides, the patterns created in the sand & the birds we could spot. It was so peaceful...
In order to make a start one of the first things I did was to create a colour palette from the inspiration surrounding me. Small postcard swatches of colour in acrylic. These would be used as a base for mark making. We explored the area immediately, gathering 'finds' of leaves, feathers, pebbles, bark, pottery etc as a reference. This was then expanded to include a huge amount of beach plastic collected from the nearby Fairbourne Beach.
The pieces were meticulously washed & sorted into colour groups. Collecting beach 'rubbish' is something I do regularly at home in Cornwall which has resulted in various bags of 'treasure'. I have been searching for an idea for how to utilise this mainly plastic debris.
While at the residency I have started to explore working with these beach finds...very early stages but I am excited by the prospect of developing these ideas. I want to incorporate my metalwork with the coloured pieces. This will be an ongoing project over the coming months.
The next exploration I would like to share is the mark making both Sarah & I used during our time in the studio. Impressions were made with a knead-able eraser & ink pad. A very satisfying way of producing marks. I used a lot of the pieces from the beach collections for this but also some of the more natural finds. I worked directly onto some of the painted papers & kept a reference of the marks in my journal. I think it is useful to have this notation of what created the mark as you think you will remember but often don't!
Further mark making with found objects, meditatively making repetitive shapes. Another technique, which although I have obviously used before, was collage. Utilising some of the 'printed' papers, cutting & assembling colours & layers. On this occasion I used a paste to adhere the papers which took a little while to prefect the technique.
Some collage cats also made an appearance... it was a joy to have the company of a real feline too, with Toby the resident cat joining us from time to time. In the second week of our residency time seemed to speed up! It is odd how different it felt from that first week, we became very aware of the approaching end of the creative break.
