1st day: setting up and making a start...

Today was the first day of my residency at Touchstones Rochdale Art Gallery. After setting out my workspace and preparing some participatory drawing activities, I spent quite a long time during the morning reviewing some of my past notes, sketches and research note books, mainly from my time at Artists Unlimited in Bielefeld. Each time I look back through older note books I always find something to revisit that I have completely forgotten about - it's one of the main reasons I keep so many sketchbooks in my studio, I have them dating back to 1998 and still look through the early ones from time to time.

I made lots new research notes; things to look up again, to re-investigate, lists of words and processes to develop..

And also started to sketch out some new ideas, which I am looking forward to developing but I'm really pleased to have made a good start...

One part of my residency that I am really excited about is the three participatory drawing activities I have for the visitors of the gallery to take part in. 

Each sketchbook has a written instruction that participants must follow - to find out what they are come and visit me in the gallery and have a go! I will be writing about these instructions as the weeks go by so keep posted!

The instructions are very straight forward and take just a few moments to complete. Each instruction is designed to investigate how we respond to very simple written instructions as drawn interpretation and each activity deals with how we can express line, shape, form and texture by drawing.

I will be using every contribution in a series of new drawings and I will be posting about these drawings during my time on the residency. 

Thanks to everyone who took part in the activities today and to those visitors who stopped to chat with me.

Here are just a few of the contributions..