A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place

A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place

Jan Guy

In the Northern Spring of 2015 I spent a month in Finland at the Arctic Ceramics Centre as a resident artist and in the Northern Spring of 2016, I was a resident at the Yingge Ceramics Museum in Taiwan. In 2018, I did a residency in Hong Kong.

The power of a sense of place to influence one’s creative endeavours seems obvious, but when one is lifted out of one’s everyday place and dropped into a foreign land the awareness of place is made acute, sometimes even confrontational. The experience is often life changing.

The notion of place is more than a point on a map, a geographical position or the formal qualities of a space; though none of these aspects can be discounted when discovering any sense of place. Nor can one assume a singularity of time or physical presence for while, as Alphonso Lingis states, ‘To be born is to take place, to occupy a place that is one’s own. The “I” is a standpoint, a point of departure.’[1], finding place is coloured by what one leaves behind and perhaps, to what one will return. Then, each place is a layering of actual times, landscapes and conversations bound to the virtualities of imagination, memory and self.

This paper will discuss these ideas and the value of the artist’s residency in terms of the fortuitous, challenging and unexpected experiences with other artists and their work and the formal and poetic influences on my own practice.

[1]P.10 The Imperative