Caitlin Heffernan looks back at her time at Braziers International Workshop - an annual Arts Council sponsored workshop that brings artists from all over the world to the heart of the British countryside.
Set just within the Chilterns, the grounds of Braziers Park residential college and community grounds provide a beautiful setting in which to spend two weeks during August for the annual Braziers International Artist’s workshop.
Driving to the workshop, the house and grounds are set back from the busy road, winding through open fields and wooded lanes to slowly reveal a rather grand old house that reminds me of the opening of the Hitchcock film Rebecca.
The house and grounds exist as a sort of community, developed after the 1950s as an experiment in communal living. Since then Braziers has been home to a rich and varied crowd - from Ian Fleming’s childhood house through to a hang-out for Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull.
Braziers Workshop is a non-profit making organisation set up in 1995. Taking place each August it is an artist-led initiative which strives to provide a meeting point for artists working in all visual disciplines.
It brings together up to 30 artists of all nationalities for 16 days to work, exchange dialogue and experiment in a way that is mutually beneficial. It offers an opportunity of participating in an activity removed geographically and conceptually from usual studio practice in an environment where experiments can be made and leaps of imagination can occur.
The journey there was filled with excitement and apprehension at the prospect of living and working with 30 artists for the next fortnight. It was a searingly hot summer’s day and arriving at this stunning location felt at once peaceful and familiar.
I was shown to where I would be staying - it was sharing with two other people and I soon realised that time spent on my own would be a precious commodity.
The first day and a half was taken up with trying to remember people’s names, where people were from and exploring the house and grounds. The house had a beautiful old library, a music room with a piano, a drawing room and a wonderful terrace and garden.
Behind the house were woods where fantastical looking mushrooms sprouted out of trees and the ground and a previous artist’s tree-house was situated. The surrounding countryside and fields stretched out and our lives soon became embedded in the peaceful rhythms of the day.
Meal times were set out punctually throughout the day - which at first seemed very rigid and almost as though we were constantly eating, but actually a fantastic result of this was that all of the group came together, to eat, to talk and share our experiences of how we were getting along.
Lunchtimes were an artwork in themselves, with the artist co-ordinator Keran James playing a fantastic role as the main chef and creator of amazing feasts to feed us hungry artists. In fact the generosity of the organiser’s time and the effort they made to make the workshop enjoyable and to provide the time and space to make work, was one of the most memorable and overwhelming qualities of my time at Braziers.
We were allocated spaces that in some cases matched how we worked and other times were more random. Braziers’ grounds are extensive and home to many quirky and wonderful outbuildings that are fantastic spaces in which to work. Spaces ranged from clean white spaces to more ‘difficult’ places such as the huge barn with gaps all around that at night illuminated the grounds in a spectacular way.
I was allocated to work in the old coach house along with two other artists; I immediately fell in love with the space. It was very large with beautiful sea green tiles around the edges of the ‘horse-box’ area where they kept the horses.
There was an industrial sewing machine and large old wheel used for sharpening tools - neither of them seemed to work - and a ladder propped against one of the wooden doors. The ceiling had large open ‘patches’ that revealed the rest of the roof. The roof was also home to bats that gave me a nice surprise when I was working late one evening…..
The old horse-box area was complete with an old sink that the horses drank out of, inside it had a strangely domestic feel to the space, and the walls were covered in mottled blues and greens where paint and plaster of previous years had flaked off.
I began by drawing back into the walls; the mottled walls, to me, looked like some wallpaper pattern - or the clouds. It was subtle and would slowly reveal itself the more time you spent in the space.
During the first few days I began walking as a way of familiarising myself with the landscape. In the fields behind the house I came across a strange scrubland with white stones and strange plants growing out of it that seemed at odds with the rest of the beautiful landscape. Strewn across some of the plants were white cotton-like flowers.
They were thistledown flowers that had dried and separated after time. Picking up as many as I could I took them back to the coach house and immediately began sewing them together in long lines, making the connection with the sewing machine and the state of flux in which the building, the grounds and the flowers existed.
I began collecting thistledown moss in earnest from the gorse bushes surrounding the grounds and house of Braziers. The process of collecting the dried flowers and sewing them together was very much about responding to ‘now’, their temporal quality and the impossibility of holding on to this moment.
The constant repair and disrepair was an aspect that I responded to and chose materials and processes that reflected this. By working in the coach house space over the course of the two weeks it allowed me to gradually put together an installation that subtly intervened with the space. Drawings and objects were set around and within the interior that fostered links with the real and the imagined.
The floor in the coach house was amazing and I started making rubbings of the floor and left them there in patches that echoed the ceiling above and were slowly revealed to the viewer once inside the space.
Over the course of the two weeks I also learnt a lot from the other artists, from conversations over tea or wine in the evening, from talking and by being with mine and other people’s work continuously during this period. There were opportunities to meet with invited artists, critics and curators as well as group discussions.
At the end of our two weeks was the open day, which gave the public a chance to view the work in progress. Like everyone else I felt completely exhausted but very happy – and privy to an amazing time. The work produced was inspirational and challenging from all the artists.
Artists from all over the world took part in the two-week workshop. Boubacar Diabong, otherwise known as ‘Mr Cool’ originally from Senegal but now living in France used a bed as part of his performance and thinking, he could be seen at various points in the grounds on the Open Day lying on his bed. The thinking and dreaming allowed him to travel to different locations.
Jacob Jari from Nigeria made tiny beautiful beads from magazines, where words were wrapped up and encapsulated and used to form a picture where a motif was slowly revealed to the viewer. Larissa Sansour who is Palestinian but currently lives in Copenhagen made a horror film based on the Shining, filmed in the house, that interweaves our current fear of ‘Arabs’ and the War on Terror.
I miss the people, the house and the gardens and I miss seeing all the daily changes in people’s work, Fiona Macdonald's strange lettuce sculptures, the singing cars Yasson Banal and Brigitte Jurack's red bed linen spilling out of the building’s windows...
I miss seeing the pigs everyday running at full pelt across the field to say hello and expecting to be fed - although at the end of our visit two of them were to be killed for food which affected us all and we were all a bit upset! I miss seeing Juan Pablo Echeverri in his Snow White costume or various other outfits and wigs, especially after he had been filming with the pigs and they had tried to eat his skirt.
The importance of workshops such as Braziers is not to be underestimated; more things like this are needed for emerging and established artists and are an all too rare opportunity to mix and work with a variety of people from across the world. I feel privileged to have been part of it.
A drawing by Andrea Heller. Photograph Richard Moss / Culture24
Caitlin Heffernan is an artist and the Artist Resource Manager at Fabrica, Brighton.
Two of the workshop's co-founders, Gill Ord and Bernadette Moloney will be giving a free presentation about the workshop and its benefits to artists at Fabrica, Brighton on Monday December 3 2007 at 7pm. For further information call Fabrica on 01273 778646. Or see the website www.fabrica.org.uk
