New York Residency recipient Mandy McIntosh (2004)
Mandy McIntosh was the 2004 recipient of the Scottish Art Council New York residency. The residency gives an artist the opportunity to research and develop his/ her work.
Earlier in 2004, Mandy was offered the Scottish Arts Council award which included a rent-free apartment in Manhattan. The apartment is in the financial district at the tip of Manhattan and is a landmark in its area. Wall Street is one block up and the stock exchange is around the corner. Battery park is two minutes away with views of the statue of Liberty. It is five minutes walk to the Statten Island Ferry terminal and the waterfront is even closer with views of the Brooklyn Bridge.
The apartment was offered with a bursary of £7,500 to enable the artist to develop her practice in New York for a period of six months, from April to September 2004.
Mandy found her experience in New York to be invaluable to her career and artistic development (she has since won a Bafta Award). Here, she tells us about her experience:
'My work is very mobile, sometimes electronic, sometimes film, sometime objects. When I say mobile, I mean that it shifts context and form and methodology. Sometimes it’s made in a site-specific sociological context, for example, a virtual reality simulacrum of a real mining village in Staffordshire which hosted a hypothetical monument to miners. Sometimes it’s more simple. Recently, I made a garment which encapsulated my thinking on the symbolism of vultures in the American landscape.
| Right now, I am in pre-production for a new animation work which is autobiographical. It looks at a period of time when I lived in Johannesburg as a child during apartheid. My background is in fashion, textiles. I worked in Paris as a designer. Then I travelled and came home to do an MA in Design at Glasgow School of Art. I use design methodology in my work but I am no longer a designer. In the future I will draw a lot more. |
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The benefit of my New York residency was very profound. It’s a very generous and rich opportunity to be awarded the chance to punctuate practice like this. For someone to say, "We will open this bracket for you and give you a blank space and then close the bracket when you come home and what happens inside those brackets is totally up to you, do what you consider to be valuable".
| The benefit of my New York residency was very profound. It’s a very generous and rich opportunity to be awarded the chance to punctuate practice like this. |
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I was awarded the residency at a time when my visual and mental relationship with my home city was pretty calcified. I had been working a lot in public art collaboration and I was mentally very tired. |
So New York was reviving and stimulating and warm and the resources of the city made me think in new ways about what I want to bring into my practice, what my practice is, how I might be able to develop it.
The behaviour of New York made me feel very multi-dimensional, and that my work was very much a bi-product of thinking. It was good for me to feel separate from what I make. To go through very ephemeral thought processes which did not necessarily need to reach any tangible conclusions.
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One of the things I really wanted to explore in New York was black American history. It felt totally crucial that I do that, I work a lot from gut reactions and instinctively wanted to look at this subject in some detail. I am still researching and this dovetails with my current Johannesburg work. I went out of the city too, to Mississippi and Louisiana and Georgia. But it was in New York, every day, riding the subway, going to the other boroughs, watching people, looking at art, all the things I did on a daily basis. It was in New York that I felt most connected to a pulse or an ambience that was thrilling to me and which was completely indescribable, the perfect host environment for the way I wanted my brain to be working at that time. I was seduced every day by the city. |
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My work is richer and better informed in several ways. Literally, I know more within my current area of research. Also, I feel less conflicted about aesthetic pleasure.
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I can still follow quite complex, plural lines of enquiry but they will be more spliced and correspond to bigger themes which I will be able to identify in simpler ways. I am interested in reaching a fuller understanding of what I personally invest in what I make. I am a more consolidated artist and person'. |
| For more information about Mandy's work, visit Mandy's website. | |