Artist Residencies: Why They Transform a Practice

An artist residency is a parenthesis in the ordinary flow of work. It removes the artist from their familiar environment — the well-known studio, established routines, recurring interlocutors — and places them in a new space with new constraints and new possibilities. This dislocation is uncomfortable by definition, and that is precisely why it is productive. My residency with Coty UK in Paris, in the context of participation in 1-54 London, was one of those experiences that durably modify a way of seeing and working.

The context of this residency was particular: it involved working in dialogue with the world of perfume. Coty, one of the oldest houses in the sector, wanted to explore the intersections between visual creation and olfactory creation. At first glance, the proposal seemed seductive but risky — the danger of a collaboration between an artist and a brand is always that of recuperation, of reducing the work to a communication support. But the way Coty structured the project — giving the artist total freedom over the creation, and inscribing the fragrance in dialogue with the work rather than the inverse — dispelled that concern.

What the residency taught me, first of all, is the power of creative constraint. Working in a new space, with materials that had to dialogue with a sense I did not control — the olfactory — forced me to think differently about the question of presence. A visual work can be looked at and ignored, one can approach or step back from it. A perfume occupies space imperiously: it imposes itself, envelops, persists. Working with that awareness modified my way of envisaging the physical impact of a painting — how it occupies space beyond its frame, how it radiates or conversely closes in on itself.

Artist residencies are also invaluable spaces of encounter. In that context, I was able to converse with perfume creators, designers, architects working in universes apparently distant from mine but sharing common concerns: the relationship between form and time, between matter and memory, between sensation and signification. These exchanges broadened my conceptual vocabulary in a way that isolated studio practice alone could not have allowed.

For artists who hesitate to commit to a residency — from fear of uprooting, attachment to habits, mistrust of the institutional or outside world — I would simply say this: discomfort is the sign that something is happening. The ideal residency is not the one that gives you everything you need: it is the one that obliges you to adapt, to invent, to step outside the known repertoire. It is in that space of creative discomfort that the most interesting works are born.

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