Ania Bas reflects on her Talking Birds residency

I arrived at The Nest with the beginnings of an idea that I wanted to explore in a new and slower way. Parenthood and precarious living gives me less time to meander and not-know when it comes to art and writing. These days in precious minutes that I can dedicate to my practice I launch myself into working on half-formed material with its final look somewhat predetermined. That way of working definitely brings results but it also makes me less adventurous as I tend to opt for safe options and stick to a way of working that I’m already familiar with. 

I craved time and space to try working differently and Hatching residency offered me 10 days of freedom. In that time I mapped out a body of knowledge and experience that I wanted to account for and I took time figuring out if there is a body of work within it. I don’t want to assume that every life experience I have I need to make into an artwork. 

Very quickly ideas I was mapping started to take shape of characters and situations; within the first few days I mapped out a plot for a new novel and I have immediately launched myself into writing it too, trying out narrative voices and points of view. I have caught myself thinking that was like a repeat, that I have done that before and I decided to stop. That resistance not to carry on with the text production was uncomfortable. I felt as if I am wasting time and had to keep reminding myself that this residency is a chance to learn to work differently, to not launch myself into outcomes too quickly and take time to interrogate how I work. 

So instead, I made myself read books that on the surface looked unconnected to my themes. I fished them out of the Talking Birds library and enjoyed titles spanning diverse and timely themes of motherhood, race, white privilege, rest, forest school, class, walking, nature and activism.

I made myself stretch and introduced a YouTube yoga session to my afternoons. 

I took proper lunch breaks and made time to talk to other people in the flock. 

I had a lot of coffee.

I spent one afternoon sitting in an adjacent space turned into a photography studio while Mandip Singh Seehra, a fellow artist in residency, was using my face to test light and backdrop. 

I had a rich conversation with Janet Vaughan that spanned a number of subjects and left me with a plan to build my personal ‘set design’ that can be light, made from sustainable materials, easy to rearrange, reuse and re-appropriate for a number of contexts in which I operate. And some aspects of that ‘set design’ I have already built and tested. 

I left The Nest with a sense that a slower, carefully planned, sustainable, low impact way of working/making is possible and within my reach. I left energised and connected to a group of artists that offer home for ideas and space to experiment. 

The initial idea that I wanted to explore is now a bulky folder filled with material that I plan to turn, yes, into a novel. But that novel is now set in a rich and expanded world thanks to all the percolating, conversations and reading. I have also started writing from, what feels like, a more informed place. The residency made room for some offshoots ideas that I plan to act on as I launch myself into yet another lengthy process of writing a book.

I had a creative accident too. I spent one of the days looking at the leftovers of a writing project that I brought to the studio from home by mistake. It felt like a waste of time to go back home to swap folders so I decided to give what I had in front of me a go – and I wrote a short story as a result. That work has nothing to do with my planned residency, the themes or areas of knowledge I wanted to explore, but it exists and writing it in a studio filled with a morning light brought me a lot of joy.

Ania Bas is an artist, writer and arts organiser who works across text, performance, publishing and social engagement. She’s originally from Poland and works in her second language. Her work has been commissioned by the Tate, Whitechapel Gallery, Art on the Underground, Whitstable Biennale/Cement Fields and Coventry Biennial. Ania’s debut novel ‘Odd Hours’ published in 2022 was named by Irish Examiner their novel of the year – ‘[an] enigmatic and idiosyncratic gem [that] is eccentric, quirky and utterly original.’

Find out more at aniabas.com