Ghosts On the Path

If I’m honest, the thing I was most looking forward to during my recent residency in Portugal was a few weeks away from my deaf cat, Marge. Marge regularly hits the howl button any time from 2.30am onwards. It’s like living with a furry newborn who never grows up and sleep deprivation is unfortunately just part of the deal.

The magical mystery path through the cork trees to the studio..

The residency was on a cork farm in the Alentejo region, one of the most peaceful places I’ve ever been. Vast landscapes. Cork oaks. Silence. The first few nights I slept better than I had in years. But on the 4th night, I woke to a familiar sounding howl. It was incessant. I thought I was going mad. I looked everywhere but couldn’t find her, outside, inside, it was like she was trapped in a space in the rafters, or I’d become a bona fide lunatic.

I lay in bed thinking this can’t be happening. Portugese Marge has found me, I’m trapped in some terrible international deaf-cat purgatory I can’t escape. I double dropped some Nightol, toilet paper in the ears, shoved some pillows over my head and braced till morning...

While recounting the sorry tale the next day to my fellow artist Alina, a Ukrainian from Kyiv, I suddenly remembered who I was talking to. My story about being kept awake by a cat felt rather less dramatic as it left my mouth but I ploughed on as it felt weirder to stop.

We decided the cat who lived out front of the building had just had a tough night guarding her increasingly independent kittens but I couldn’t shake the idea that the nightly hell of my Brighton life had somehow followed me to the Portuguese countryside.

The path to the studio was like something from a fairy tale; glorious, undulating hills with twisting, partly scalped but seriously charismatic cork and olive trees. No roads in sight or traffic noise, just high-pitched birdsong and the occasional clanking rustic bell round the neck an of animal or two.

Leaving the cottage each day though, I cranked my tunes up loud in my ears for the journey down the magical track, something I always do at home to get myself studio psyched as I make my way along the seafront. Sometimes it feels as though I can’t go anywhere without my headphones.

At first I questioned it. Why am I doing the same shit in Portugal – isn’t the point to be taking it in, all of the sounds in nature and arriving slowly ?

But after a few days I just accepted I preferred my beats to birdsong for whatever reason. I loved the fact that powered by the dance music from my youth, I was bouncing down the mediaeval path through the ancient cork trees towards a converted sheep barn in the Alentejo to make some art.

That’s all sorts of ghosts on the path converging.

I grew up in the countryside of the West of Scotland and found a lot of childhood comfort in the animals that wandered through it. The smell of soil on a big dog’s paws still has an almost ridiculous power to calm me down. Something about the cork farm felt familiar too. Not because it looked like rural Scotland. It didn’t, but because it carried the same combination of four legged friends, silence and space.

I’d arrived with a project I’m developing in mind; reclaiming the younger self and trying to find the freedom and authenticity of that time through dance and music. The beats in my ears were important because they unlock memories of emotion and physicality for me. Despite the idyllic setting, whatever Portugal was doing for me, it hadn’t cured my compulsion to get to the studio and work.

I started making quick ink drawings on paper and before long I’d built quite a collection. I’d used brown ink; the work had been getting brighter and shoutier at home, so this felt like a departure.

As someone who’s worked alone for many years, sharing a studio space felt like a bit of a novelty. I couldn’t help but look across the studio where Alina was making work rooted in recent experiences in Ukraine I could scarcely imagine.

Meanwhile I was finding shapes in memories of the dancefloor, disappearing into headphones and basslines. At times what I was doing felt embarrassingly lightweight but we had each arrived with our own ghosts, and were trying to make sense of them in the best way we knew how.

As the weeks progressed, my figures shifted from raving hands-in-the-air to crawling and dragging themselves along the ground. At first I imagined them under tables or nightclub stages, but the longer I looked at them the less sure I became. They seemed to be turning into something more animalistic. It felt a bit like they’d staggered out of the nightclub and onto the farm. This felt like where the residency started to come alive for me in the studio.

A ridiculous twist of fate was that my daily job soon became feeding Portuguese Marge and her five kittens. As I opened the pouches of Felix every morning and nearly got toppled by the hungry cute squad, I realised that even my feline responsibilities had followed me across Europe.

By the end of my time there, it struck me that nobody arrives anywhere alone. We bring our histories, habits, memories and obsessions with us. For a few weeks, the past and present converged; urban lives briefly displaced in a rural setting, with the work in that converted sheep barn emerging from the big cauldron of it all.

Echoes of a deaf cat from Brighton, five kittens on a cork farm, dancefloors, childhood animals, war, ancient trees and lives shaped in very different corners of the world.

A temporary meeting point of multiple timelines and a few weeks I will never forget.

A huge thank you to residency hosts, Paul and Ines for giving me time and space at Monte Japonica and for supporting artists in such an important way.

Out of the nightclub and onto the farm…