My studio, and working without it

I never thought including ‘UK’ in my website domain or Instagram handle would prove to become irrelevant amidst an increasingly potential relocation for me from London to New York.

From March until the end of May I’m going to be in New York, living in a friend's apartment, with no studio space. I’d like to write in more depth soon about my expectations of New York, and subsequently the impacts and limitations it’s had on me in the coming weeks, but for now I want to reflect & anticipate on how I’m going to work and create without any dedicated studio space for the foreseeable.

I’ve now moved out of my flat in London, it made little sense for me to continue to pay rent there whilst I’m back and forth from England and The US. In turn, I surrendered my working space, my bedroom studio; A humble corner of the room with a set of wooden drawers, an easel, imagery taped to the walls, two £10 LED rings off eBay and questionable reappropriated decanters & kitchen crockery, where a musk of solvents and emulsion taints the air. Yes, the same air I breathe as I sleep. Very healthy indeed.

Studio spaces take a while to break in. They aren’t brought, designed, or completed within a weekend of assigning a space, they need wearing in. The materials take time to develop also. The most frequently used act as a cornerstone for the studio, with alternative supplies building up around them. I’d say it took a good 8 months for my working space to feel completely developed and to feel comfortable within it, yet now I’m without that place where I feel most aware of creating.

So what direction is my work going to take now seeing as it's not entirely plausible for me to work in physical mediums? The tools I have with me are my point and shoot cameras, film & digital, and laptop. I shot a fair amount of photos on film in England, and this is typically what I used to work from, but photography is somewhat going to become the primary medium for me for now. I’m entirely open to swaying to digital methods of assemblage, collaging and editing from the manual, mechanical techniques I'm used to - and I sort of have to be, it's really my only feasible option. Yet there's a lot I can learn in this sphere.

I'm going to be shooting a lot more film, and in general taking more photos in NYC, but I feel more inclined to diversify from portraiture, or at-least portrait centred photography/work. Exploring avenues of comfort, recognition and empathy outside of faces and expressions seems totally out of the ordinary for me, yet I think there's plenty of interesting experiments and routes I can take here. Textural based imagery and amalgamations for example are something I'm keen to elaborate on.

However, this limitation is becoming somewhat exciting for me. I have to be more resourceful and exercise my creative intuition. I’m in a place where everything is new to me. I know very few people here and none of the local area. If my work aims to occupy an assault on comfort, then perhaps it makes sense for me to create work in an uncomfortable environment.