Nicholas Holt's JOYA Spain AER Residency Report

First days

After four days of travel, it was a joy to have the luxury of a comfortable room,  nourishing food, and two uninterrupted weeks to devote to my practice amid an  incredible landscape. JOYA is a unique cultural centre in an arid and de- populated land, there is a quality of ingenuity, resilience, and positivity there that  I found energising. I appreciated the peaceful, supportive atmosphere,  which gave me the physical and mental space to be able to immerse myself in  the surrounding area.

As an artist working with the land, the rhythm of my days was dictated by the  intense heat of the Spanish summer sun.  I would rise as the first glow of the sun  appeared through my bedroom window, make coffee in the Italian-style  percolator, and walk out into the cool morning air to start the day’s explorations.  By 10am the temperature would soar, and I would retreat to the  house for breakfast.

During the daytime, I would research, make notes, develop ideas, and chat with  the other resident artists. In the evening I would resume my explorations, before  making my way back to watch the sunset over the valley with my fellow  residents – a daily ritual at the JOYA residency.

I made work using the approach that I developed during my MA - responding to  a place rather than using ideas that were already formed in my head. I spent the  first week taking meditative walks, using the heightened senses that arose from being in a new environment.

Whilst walking I made digital and film photographs of the landscape for my  desertification project: of the arid topography, daisies pushing their way through  the cracked earth, an abandoned farmhouse, irrigation systems,  exposed tree roots reaching into space from a gorge wall, boulder fields where  barley struggles to grow, almond trees (one of the few things that can grow  here) and scorched fields with the same white hue as the unpaved roads.

Conversations and collaborations

As this was my first artist residency, I was unprepared for the positive impact  that living and working with the other resident artists would have on me.  Inspiration came from unexpected directions: being handed a self-published  book by Rosie, a young writer from New Zealand with an engaging literary style;  conversations with Kay, a video artist with a more nuanced approach to  narrative than myself, listening to a performance of ‘cut-up’ poetry by Katherine,  an engaging writer from London, seeing the work of Alice, an artist who forged  her path by moving to Florence to study traditional printing and drawing  techniques; conversations with Solomon – Simon and Donna’s son – a  photography graduate from Madrid with impressive darkroom expertise.

One feature of the residency that I particularly enjoyed was the talks that each  artist gave in the evenings. This helped to fill in the gaps between the casual  conversations during the week. This was the first time that I had presented my work outside of the MA and this was a valuable experience for me.

Landscape immersion

As my residency progressed and I became more immersed in the landscape, I  experienced a shift in perception. In a gorge created by a Gota Fría (an intense  rain storm), the boundaries between human and natural phenomena began to  blur - sculptures created by previous artists might appear to be naturally  formed; conversely, natural forms - an arrangement of pebbles on a rock - might appear to be sculpture. Embedded in the landscape at JOYA, these distinctions  seemed less important. This brought to mind a conversation that I had with my  Zen teacher who exclaimed ‘There is nothing we can do that is not nature’.

I became interested in the nuanced overlapping of nature and culture on the  site and began to create an artwork specific to JOYA.

How better to know a place than to know the earth of a place?1 the artist  Michelle Stuart once asked. With this in mind, I made experiments with camera- less photography by placing light-sensitive photo paper at various locations and  exposure times around the site – buried in the arid earth of a field, at the  bottom of a gorge, under needles at the foot of a pine tree, and on the rocky  slopes of a nearby hill. These interactions were an attempt to translate the  imprint of the earth at the site into cultural form.

Darkroom experiments

After exposure, the photograms were fixed in the JOYA darkroom. I then made a  series of medium format and 4x5 film photographs of natural and human- made phenomena around the site, which I developed and printed in the  darkroom. Although my initial darkroom experiments of variable quality –  inspired by Guido Guidi’s book Varianti2 – I left my marks of manipulation on the  4x5 contact prints, recording my physical presence in a way that I could not  do with inkjet prints. Whilst in the darkroom I experimented with leaving earth in  the tray whilst developing the 4x5 prints – adding specificity to the work.

It felt satisfying to engage with analog processes in this way and this will become  part of my practice in the future – on returning home I have begun to create my darkroom to continue to learn these skills.

Creating ‘JOYA Overlay’

Since returning from Spain I am creating an artwork that is inspired by the  overlapping of nature and culture that I found at JOYA. I am working with both  analog and digital processes to create ‘JOYA Overlay’, a formatted grid of  photograms and 6x7 photographs presenting a web of natural and human- made forms – blending my experience with the collective history of the site.

This work has a more open narrative structure than my previous projects,  combining the rigour of the grid with the emotive flow of  images on it – aiming  for what Lucy Lippard describes as a sensuous dialectic between nature and  culture3. Lucy Lippard’s book Overlay – in which discusses art that is embedded  in nature and also connected to social contexts - has been influential in the  making of this work. As has the ideas of Robert Smithson and other artists associated with the Land Art movement of the 1970s.

The JOYA residency has been an enriching experience for me. I am grateful to  everyone involved in the UAL AER residency programme and to Simon and  Donna at JOYA for this opportunity.

Notes

1. Michelle Stuart quoted in Carol Kino, A Cosmos of Matter, Enshrined in Her Art, New York Times, August 30, 2013, https://www.nytimes.
   com/2013/08/30/arts/design/michelle-stuarts-work-at-the-parrish-art-museum.html (accessed September 6, 2023).
2. Guidi, G. (1995) Varianti, Udine: Tavagnacco
3. Lippard, L. (1983) Overlay, New York: Knopf Doubleday

Related Links

• Art for the Environment International Residency Programme (AER) 
• JOYA: arte + ecología, Spain
• Nicholas Holt's Winning AER Residency Application
• UAL Centre for Sustainable Fashion
• UAL Post-Grad Community

Art for the Environment Residency Programme

The Art for the Environment Residency Programme (AER) provides UAL graduates with the opportunity to apply for a 2 to 4 week fully funded residency at one of our internationally  renowned host institutions, to explore concerns that define the 21st century – biodiversity,  environmental sustainability, social economy and human rights.

Founded in 2015, internationally acclaimed artist Professor Lucy Orta, UAL Chair of Art for the Environment – Centre for Sustainable Fashion, launched the programme in partnership with  international residency programmes and UAL Post-Grad Community.