Princeton 2017
For this residency, we headed to the Paul Robeson Center, which is located right in the heart of Princeton, New Jersey on Witherspoon Street. Princeton is a small, bustling town known for it’s University Campus, which is integrated into the town filled with galleries, shops, fabulous restaurants, cafes and (our favorite) ice cream places. Admittedly, we dropped by The Bent Spoon for ice cream and Small World Cafe for delicious lattes many times. It was a real pleasure to be incorporated into the life of the town for a month as we kept daily open studios hours and had many exciting interactions with visiting locals throughout our time there. The Taplin Gallery staff tore down a wall that was blocking the window into the gallery, so that we could have natural light in the space and people walking by could see us at work, wave to us and stop in. This month-long residency was made especially fantastic thanks to Fiona’s family who put us up and fed us delicious homemade meals for the entire stay.
PROCESS
We started three large drawings in Inverness which became our launching point in Princeton. When we worked on Current Fluctuations Fiona thought about the big bang and outward moving forces, whereas Maria imagined the viewer standing inside of a vein or blood vessel with liquid rushing towards them. With these two different perspectives, we also had different thoughts on how to display the work. Ultimately when we finished, we realized the orientation could be viewed either way; vertically or horizontally.
The Princeton residency was all about slowly adding more colours into our way of working. We had challenged ourselves away from using just black and red as we did during the last residency, and we embraced blue, orange as well as small amounts of greys and purples during this residency. Each time we collaborate we get more and more comfortable with our colour palette and open it up further.
EXHIBITION
Working inside the Taplin Gallery was a real joy, but seeing the works up on the walls for the exhibition afterwards was an amazing transformations of the space. We gave an artist talk right before the opening that had excellent attendance with an engaged audience, many of whom had visited us during our open studio hours. It was really wonderful to hear people’s feedback and often poetic opinions about the project.
To see more photos from this show and the opening, click here.
BEHIND THE SCENES
