Campbell PattersonI had a read of what is on the websites and, no, I don’t think that they really sum up my residencies that well. Most of what is on the Gasworks and Headlands websites is more relevant to where I was at in 2020, when I was supposed to do both residencies.^[02] 02. Instead, Patterson completed the Headlands residency from 19 July – 31 August 2022, and the residency at Gasworks from 3 October – 19 December 2022. Awarded by the New Zealand Friends of Gasworks, Patterson’s residency at Gasworks was part of an annual residency programme co-organised by the Jan Warburton Charitable Trust and Stephanie Post in collaboration with Creative New Zealand and Elam School of Fine Arts. A lot about the way that I work doesn’t really fit into the box of how residencies work; I don’t even really think of them as projects, more specific periods of life and work. On the Gasworks page there is a promotional video of me talking about my work. During the residency I made my own edit of the interview they shot for that video. My edit is mostly just “umm” and “sorry” and shows a very real struggle to articulate anything into words. I felt like it spoke more to my way of working and was a more genuine representation of my project than what is on the website, which makes less sense to me when I try to watch it. I shared my edit as a work displayed during my open studio at Gasworks and the staff had a good laugh. They were even considering my request to replace the promotional video on their website with my edit. I struggle with this kind of direct talking on the best of days but that day was particularly bad. Luckily, failed attempts and struggle are things I am interested in so after a few days feeling despair over the interview I had a bit of a breakthrough moment with it.

CPWow, congratulations Jasmine! I didn't know you were a mum now. That’s amazing! 

I was born in Portsmouth but left before I turned one. It’s always been on my mind to visit this place and to use it to make some kind of work about my identity but I felt no major sense of belonging or anything hugely revelatory when I visited. I took two trips to Portsmouth, the weather was quite bad both times. The first time, I got off the train at the harbour, which was a really long way away from the hospital. The walk took up most of the day and when I got there I just wandered around taking photos of everything, feeling a bit stressed that I had no real good reason to be there. The second time I got the train to the right station. I bought a huge tomato from a nearby shop and crushed it between my head and the wall of one of the hospital bathrooms. Somebody walked in while I was cleaning up and a security guard soon followed but, luckily, by then I had cleaned up properly. I walked around the entire hospital a few times, ran up and down the stairwell for about an hour, and then sat on a grapefruit in another bathroom. As for how it made me feel, I guess I was at a loss for what to do, how to interact with a very human but also dehumanised building. The idea that I came from there felt big in my mind but completely meaningless in reality. It felt perverse to be there. Honestly, it felt like a kind of lonely place.

I like that quote from Mallarmé. I find that whenever I do a residency my sleeping pattern takes a dramatic turn towards nocturnal. At Headlands I was still living in New Zealand time, going to sleep almost every day after the sun had come up and waking up halfway through the afternoon, and it was similar, though less dramatic, at Gasworks. I made a series of paintings years ago and called them all jetlag, which I don’t think I fully understood at the time. I think that when I am in an intense period of making I like to be in a similar kind of headspace. Sometimes I didn’t get anything done in a day until I thought all the other residents were asleep. I became particularly obsessed with the stairs at the Headlands studio building and would run up and down them many times during my late studio nights. I took so many photos of them when it was time to leave, in an attack of sentimentality. I just don’t think you can properly appreciate something like a stairwell when other people are up and walking around.

CPI wrote my proposal for Headlands almost three years before I actually got there. I wrote about housing insecurity in my application because I was working on a commission at the time which asked me to respond to the concept of home, but even then, the idea wasn’t really that central to the work I made, just a starting point. Making work about one specific thing just isn’t how I work or think and I have chosen to communicate through art because art can communicate in a way that is not that direct or literal. The work needs to go somewhere else than my intent, it needs to live its own life away from my feelings or words. But in saying that, I think the decision to make art is always an exploration of housing insecurity on some level, especially in a residency situation, where you have a temporary home and friends and then you pack it up and go somewhere else. I find this aspect of artist residencies really difficult. I think a lot of the work I made on both residencies was essentially about anxiety or sitting still and having tons of energy. I found a process that would take as long as possible and take up as little space and got lost in it.

It was really refreshing to make art in a place where nobody knew anything about me. New Zealand can feel very small sometimes and I find that can be quite suffocating for art making. One of my favourite things was the presentations we all had to give about our practice—it felt liberating and very validating to have it seen through new eyes. My body is often in my work and I draw heavily from my life, but I intend that to be a body anonymous to the audience, the work is not supposed to be about me, the person, but me the object. 

Death metal gigs were more welcoming than the hospital, but that was not a surprise. Metal can feel like such a culture of abundance, where everybody is getting plenty of what they want—it seems like a very happy place. I went to those gigs to experience a feeling of being totally surrounded, like being lost inside a pillow, and that was exactly what it was like.

CPWell, when I did start working at Headlands, I started using materials that I could find around the place: a soiled blue microfibre rag (which I spent a while cleaning), wood glue from the workshop, tiny amounts of acrylic paint from one of the painters working there, and, of course, my phone. I made a video in each studio documenting the daily attempts to fit into these jeans my dad gave me, which are too small. I’m mostly completely nude in the video and I’m super self-conscious about it; I may never exhibit it. I never managed to fit into them comfortably. The jeans sat in the middle of the studio for most of both residencies, I would put them on then take them off and put them down, the video cuts to me picking them up the next day and the studio evolves in the background.

I also revisited a process that I had played with many years ago, of rubbing wood glue and paint between my hands until it hardened into a putty-like consistency which could then be used like a sort of paint. I think the desire to explore this came from the experience of breaking my right arm at the start of 2022 and the rehab processes involved in the healing. About a week before I left New Zealand, in July, I fell on that same arm and fractured my shoulder so was still in quite a bit of pain when I arrived at Headlands. It felt good to push against the resistance of the drying glue. I became interested in the parallel between physical healing and emotional healing, and wanted to explore that space. 

In the paintings that I was finishing before leaving New Zealand, I was consciously trying to slow down the painting process. I thought that once overseas I would emerge from this place and increase the pace of the process but actually I ended up slowing it down even more, to the point where I started to think about it as being something my body was dissolved in. I continued to explore this process at Gasworks, but more as a process than as a means for composition. Less interested in the material being fixed in a certain way than letting it fall to the floor to be swept into the work. More and more, I felt like my project was an exploration of both sitting still and rapidly moving, not articulating but trying.

Also, while at Gasworks I made the decision to title my works torso if there was no other title for them. Torso instead of untitled because, if nothing else, the works are of that part of the body, where anxiety and restlessness dwell.

I didn’t document the actions at the hospital. I think of them as research, ways to interact with a building. I was interested in the futility of that interaction; that I felt very small and insignificant in relation. Exercise is a huge part of my creative process and just daily life. It helps to be moving, helps to process things and ideas, and sometimes it’s just really hard to sit in front of a laptop for any length of time without wanting to get up and run away!

CPYes! The concept of fitting/not fitting felt central to my explorations overseas. Also, you are right, the torso can definitely be extended to laughter! But I don’t think about laughter when I make my work. I don’t really think about humour at all but I do like to explore the absurd and the ridiculous because there is a real freedom there, and you can hide a lot. It’s also liberating to move away from the rational! I am definitely interested in that too, though there needs to be a balance. I think it would be a disservice to that part of the work to consciously explore humour in any kind of laboured way. Maybe I’m too close to the work to even know what people are going to find funny. It does make me happy that people can see humour in the work. Laughter is a good response, it is a nice thing but it can quickly be devalued in this context. I think an art gallery is a space where people really want to laugh.