My Three Weeks at The Hide — 2026

This was my second residency at The Hide, and it felt like a return to something necessary.

I had the studio to myself — and with it, the quiet rhythm of waking each day in the same room where I could simply get to work. That continuity, unhurried and uninterrupted, is something I find increasingly rare and increasingly precious.

This year I arrived with a specific focus: a collaborative project with another artist, to be shown together in 2027. My strand of the research centres on coal delivery in 19th century London — and behind that, the deeper geological story of the Carboniferous period, when vast forests collapsed and were compressed over millions of years into the coal seams we would eventually mine, burn, and build empires upon.

And yet, surrounded by the layered history and quietly dynamic landscape of the Cotswolds, I found that having a fixed endpoint — defined formats, a set narrative — began to feel somewhat constraining. The place has a way of opening things up that doesn't always sit comfortably with a predetermined brief.

A timely mentoring session with Alice proved to be exactly the reset I needed. Her observations cut through the noise and gave me the motivation to think beyond the immediate project — to remember the broader terrain of my practice and where it wants to go.

Something quietly magical seems to happen for me at The Hide. I suspect it may become an annual fixture — less a retreat, more a return.