Some of you may remember a while ago I undertook a Residency in Motherhood, the idea being that motherhood is as strange a situation to find yourself in as any other, so was as worthy of a residency exploring it as a more conventional residency. Now I have been quite bad at keeping blog posts relating to the residency up to date, and in some ways I have felt like the it hasn't been working so well for me. In fact, though, I think it's been more a question of finding the way in which motherhood integrates into my practice. So although I haven't had much luck managing directly to involve the children in my work - I find I need my own headspace when I'm in the studio, and I sometimes get a bit grumpy if they're about distracting me/knocking things over (I'm capable of doing that all by myself). But if I think about the ideas I have for future work, really quite a lot of them have grown out of things I've done with the children, things they've done with or for me, or looking at them, their world, and their outlook on life. And that shouldn't be surprising, I suppose - our ideas about our work come from our lives, and as a larger proportion of life is now spent in the world of small people than the art world, that is bound to show in the work. So I'm going to try to extend the residency in motherhood until September, when my little one goes to school, and when I'll start to be resident somewhere slightly different again, and to work up some of the ideas that they have helped me to come up with in that time.