Artist in Residency

In January 2024, I completed a month-long artist residency in the Sahara Desert, Morocco, in the small, remote village of Tissardmine, approximately 45 kilometres from the Algerian border.

For the residency, I intentionally chose to take very few traditional art materials. I wanted to challenge myself to work primarily with what I could find in the landscape and to see how this limitation might influence my process. During daily walks through the desert, I collected discarded and redundant objects, carrying them in a plastic bag I had found lying in the desert one morning. The bag gradually filled with detritus, including pieces of rusted and broken wire that had been used by local people to construct shade structures and shelters.

The process of walking, collecting and looking closely at my surroundings made me increasingly aware of small details in the landscape that I may otherwise have overlooked. I became interested in the traces of human activity within this vast environment, and in the possibility of giving discarded and overlooked materials a renewed sense of value and meaning.

Using the objects I collected, I created two suspended sculptures through a process of bricolage, resourcefulness and improvisation. I was interested in the unexpected relationships that emerged between the individual objects, allowing their different histories, forms and materials to come together in new ways.

The experience continues to influence the way I think about materials, place, resourcefulness and the potential of everyday objects.