Please join us in welcoming Ioana Dragomir to the RBC Emerging Artist Residency Program! To learn more about Ioana’s artistic practice and her plans for the incubator lab, visit her profile and read her blog post below!
Recently I’ve been reading Virginia Woolf and making work in response to her writing, and as February approaches I keep thinking about the structure of an artist residency and how it relates to the ideology Woolf puts forward in A Room of One’s Own. If you’re not familiar, here’s a rundown: in 1928 Virginia Woolf (iconic modernist writer) was asked to give a lecture on women and fiction at Cambridge University and the point she makes is that, above anything else, women doing creative work is an economic problem. In order to do so, they must have access to £500 per year and a quiet room in which to work. Which is essentially what a residency program like this one provides. In my case, I’ll also be moving into another room as I temporarily relocate from my home in Montreal to Toronto for these three months.
My plan for my time at RMG is to really use the space and what I find in it. I’m interested in what information is housed in the archive, what other artists in residence have left behind, what the institution has collected, what installation materials have not been fully exhausted, and whatever else I may find. But I’ll also be thinking a lot about Virginia and the politics of having access to this space and its resources.
Much of my work is influenced by literature and my reading lists are guided by desire. I read Woolf’s work for the first time maybe 5 years ago because it seemed like the thing to do. She was the kind of literary, feminist, modernist writer that you’re supposed to consume in part because everyone around you is. You hear that her writing is difficult to follow, difficult to jump into, and so you wear reading her work as a badge of pride. At some point it became something more. I would write about art and end up writing about her, comparing her novels to artworks they had nothing to do with, like a person newly-infatuated who drops the name of their crush into every conversation, just for the thrill of saying it and letting others know. I wrote about her novels and made artwork about them to give myself reasons to read them. And now a residency.
I’m really looking forward to bringing my obsession with this long-dead writer to RMG, seeing what happens when I try and create work about her in a studio of my own. Perhaps you’re interested in her too – drop me a line about your favourite book if you’d like.
