"The objective of this residency was to help me identify whether there is a connection between two apparently different strands in my work over recent years. In a nutshell, these can be categorised as consisting of landscape based images or moments that reveal the oddities of human behaviour. The first part of the residency in June gave me space to think through some of the work that I've been pulling together over the past couple of years. Now comes the difficult part.This week I'm continuing to work through unresolved video footage and photographs collected over the previous decade that have lain on the shelf waiting to be either abandoned or turned into something else. Having made a start on these as preparation, I'm beginning to see connections between the two aspects that I did not expect and which relate to ideas about the Gaze, repetition, duplication and hysteria."

Residency Part 1: Sinthoms, Stains & Mcguffins

Judith hosted an artist to artist conversation with Barbara Howey to mark her residency on June 14th 2012.

The residency considers the cultural experience of landscape, using the local and everyday as a place from which to reflect on wider questions of rural experiences and the relationship of the periphery, geographically and culturally, to the centre. Using a process of trial-and-error alongside conversations with invited artists, curators and casual visitors, Stewart will attempt to unravel the connections between works that at present continue to resist interpretation. The works will change and adapt in response to these conversations.

Judith Stewart is interested in the relationship between culture and politics and her current practice addresses her curiosity about the human ability to hold seemingly contradictory beliefs. This is manifested in projects relating to specificities of place and the everyday in a globalised culture, notions of the rural idyll, the romantic and sublime, and the persistence of irrational behaviours in an Age of Reason.
She is currently Artists' Support Researcher and Co-ordinator of the MA in Contemporary Art and Professional Practice for firstsite in Colchester and Associate Lecturer at University of the Arts London.

Image far left: Judith Stewart, You Never Look At Me From The PLace Which I See You, Digital image.

Image left: Judith Stewart, Untitled, 2012.

Image below: Judith Stewart, Living In The End Times, video still.