Calling all creatives! A DIY guide to building your own cultural residency
Stephanie Lyttle, Writer in Residence at Tyne & Wear Archives, August 2024.
Stephanie is a writer, creative facilitator, and PhD researcher. She is currently Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded writer in residence at Tyne & Wear Archives.
Have a Go: How to Curate Your Own Creative Residency This Summer
As a working writer, educator and researcher, my working life resembles a series of video-game side quests, but this summer’s mission has been one of my favourites: I’ve left the lecture hall behind to be writer in residence at Tyne and Wear Archives. I’m writing about it here in the hopes that my experiences will inspire you to spend some of your summer having a go at being a creative in residence, too!
Whether you’re a writer who’s got bogged down in writer’s block, or you love to draw but haven’t practiced in a while, or you’re just looking to try something new, setting aside some time and space to create your own residency experience can give you a whole new perspective on your art.
Responding to the Archives: My Experience
I arrived in the Archive in June, having never set foot inside one before, and unsure what to expect. The answer is to expect… everything. The Archive has over twelve miles of shelving stuffed with documents, maps, brochures, instruction manuals, diaries, ledgers, photographs, objects, plans, registers, posters and much more, spanning hundreds of years.
As you can see from my notes below, I started feeding search terms into the catalogue and ended up going down several different rabbit holes. I have now investigated fires and explosions in Newcastle, personal ads in the back of the Newcastle Chronicle from the 1850s, Fenwick’s Christmas menus of the past (which introduced me to terms like ‘a chiffonade of lettuce’ and ‘a petticoat tail of shortbread’), a souvenir brochure from the opening of the Paramount Cinema in Newcastle in 1931…
The photos below show my records of my searches in the Archive catalogue over the first couple of weeks of my residency. Fig 1. is the record of the search terms without any context, while fig 2. is the same page but with context for the search terms, and the connections mapped between them. Fig 3 shows only the connections, with the search terms removed.
As you can deduce from this record of my idiosyncratic journey through the Archive, I have found that what makes a creative residency special is not only how personal the process is, but also the sense of the unexpected that comes with removing yourself from your everyday life. Immersing yourself in a collection and uncovering surprising connections between yourself and the objects you explore can draw your artistic attention away from your well-worn pet subjects, the things you always return to in your art, and direct you to new possibilities.
But how can you reproduce this experience for yourself?
A Recipe for Your Own Creative Residency
1: The What
First, we need material to respond to, and we can do this by producing our own collection. At the start of your creative residency period, spend some time exploring. This can be within your own home — maybe you want to look at what you have archived already, just in the process of living life! Family photo albums, childhood books, and old recipes, for example, can all be inspiring. Maybe you want to go into your garden, if you have one, and make a photographic record of the plants, insects and flowers you find.
You might like to venture further out with your phone camera and notebook — maybe you’ll collect shells and rocks at Whitley Bay, or maybe you’ll visit museums and galleries, like Discovery Museum, or maybe you’ll look at Tyne and Wear Archive’s Flickr account for inspiration. You might even decide you want to search the Archive catalogue and make an appointment to see the holdings. Don’t worry too much about focusing on one subject or theme — like a magpie, for now you can document anything that speaks to you. Being on residency is about looking at the world with fresh, curious eyes!
2: The Where
Now we need to choose a place to ‘reside’, which here simply means a place to be creative. I’m residing in the Archive this summer, exploring the labyrinthine stores, but you can be a creative in residence in your own home (which will likely be less dusty). Maybe you want to reside in your back garden? Maybe you do your best creative work at the kitchen table, or in the attic, or on your living room sofa? Maybe, like Cassandra in Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, you write sitting in the kitchen sink, or like Agatha Christie, you have your best ideas in the bath!
3: The Weird and Wonderful
Now you can curate your collection. If you’re a visual person and your collection includes a lot of photographs, you might arrange these into a digital moodboard — there are plenty of tools to do this online. You might even decide to cultivate your residency space by surrounding yourself with your collection — just warn anyone you live with before you fill the kitchen sink with shells and rocks…
Go through everything you’ve collected, and start recording your impressions of and reactions to the material.
As you explore, ask yourself:
What made you select this for your collection?
What are your first impressions of the object?
What do you associate with this item? People, places, events?
What questions do you have about the material? What might you need to know so that you can use the material to produce creative work? Is there any historical information or social context you want to look up?
If the material is text-based, is there any intriguing use of language you might note down?
You might also like to keep notes documenting your creative process, like I did in the diagrams earlier. Don’t forget to keep good records of any online or otherwise non-physical sources so that you can find them again!
Some writing questions adapted from: Hughes, Katherine. ‘Using Archives and Special Collections in Creative Writing Research’. Information in the Curriculum, 5 June 2019.
4: The How
Now that you’ve got your material and cultivated a space, it’s time to push off into unknown waters: it’s time to create. Show your collection to others and discuss what you’ve collected — conversations can provide excellent inspiration.
Explore your collection more deeply by asking yourself:
What associations come to your mind when you look at your collection as a whole? What connections exist between the objects?
What emotions do you feel when you look at the items in your collection?
What untold stories can you find in these items? How did these items come to exist? Who can you find in these objects, and what information can you tell — or guess — about them?
Then give yourself time and space to respond creatively to your archive. You may find yourself writing or drawing or composing work you never expected. In my case, I’m compiling phrases from the Archive that would make great names for bands, and researching an English actor who got embroiled in a suspicious scandal…
5: The What Next?
Why not create a final exhibition of your work in your space? Experiment with pairing your collected objects or photographs with the work you’ve produced.
Most of all: enjoy being creative!
