Peer Matters DIY Residency, West Wales, September.
Initiated in 2024 by Photoworks and facilitated by me, together with Ezra Evans and Marguerite Thomas, Peer Matters brings together artists from across the UK, practitioners who make, share, and muddle through together.
I’m part of this group, and I also coordinated the DIY residency, helping to hold open a space where our artistic development could unfold collaboratively, setting aside for a moment the usual pressures of professionalisation and precarity.
The last time most of us were in the same room was during the residency we ran at Anna’s studio in West Wales: a few days of making, talking, working, and cooking alongside one another.
What stays with me most are the photos I took of Anna’s children playing. In them, they’re busy inventing small worlds of their own, sticks turning into swords, stones into walls (as below). It felt like an echo of what happens among creative folk, too, the way we build temporary worlds together through conversation, imagination, and shared work.
On our Sunday walk, their imaginary exchanges became happy interruptions that pulled us out of ourselves. To pass through each gate, we had to offer a small gift, a fern, a stone, or something else we’d collected along the way, small tokens in a world briefly made together.
