Repeat to Make: Repetition as Artistic Strategy

This short-read gathers material from a range of archival Freelands Foundation resources that examine the theme of repetition within artistic practice. Drawing on the 2019 publication and exhibition Repeat Repeat, the 2020 exhibition Where We Work, and the 2022 talk Springboard: The Opportunities and Challenges on the Other Side of Graduation, it offers reflections for artists – both established and emerging – on repetition as a useful strategy for making amidst balancing the responsibilities of day-to-day life. Part of Freelands’ wider research into the conditions that nurture artistic practice.

Making the space, and finding the time to make, is one of the perennial problems for the artist. When surveyed, both established and graduating artists voiced their aspirations to sustain ‘a long practice’ and ‘be part of a critical conversation with their peers’.¹  But how can one maintain a long-term practice, and dialogue with other artists, in the face of persisting constraints on time, resources and space for making, when aspirations for creative practice come into tension with the reality of day-to-day responsibilities?

In response, many artists establish their own routines, setting out rules to follow in order to make. This can manifest as: ‘when’ making takes place, ‘how’ making takes place, and even ‘where’ making takes place.

In the exhibition Where We Work, held at Freelands Foundation in 2020, a group of artist-teachers presented images of the sites where their practice takes place, highlighting the systems they implement to create time and space for making amidst their teaching responsibilities. Whilst some presented images of dedicated studio spaces, others showed their school classrooms, where they make work alongside their students or after school when everyone has left, with some even showing images of more unexpected sites of making like public transport.

Whether in a studio, afterhours in a classroom or on a bus, artists look, think and make across a variety of spaces – carving out moments amidst busy schedules juggling work and family commitments. The desk in the bedroom, the tube, the shed; all become sites of thinking and making.

Even if one finds oneself in the position of having space and time, working out what to make still poses a challenge. How does one create the right conditions for making, and for sustaining a practice?

Routine is not only a means of structuring the time and space required to make art in the face of professional commitments and domestic responsibilities, but a formal system. Continually reworking an idea, revisiting a motif, trying again, and again, is at the core of many artists’ practices, resulting in work that often transcends the deceptively simple tasks that make them up.

In 2012, Andee Collard was working as a teacher of art in a large secondary school – a role which left little time for any personal practice. In an attempt to tackle this problem, Collard set himself the task of making a drawing every day, using sheets of paper which were date-stamped in advance. At the beginning of the year, Collard struggled to choose a different thing to draw each day, settling after a few weeks on a ball of string. He drew this ball of string every day for the rest of the year, developing a ritual in which he would draw the string, return the drawing and string to a box and then photograph his drawing hand. He maintained the daily ritual for five years, creating, in the end, a series of over 1500 drawings.

Where repetition can enable productivity and structure in some cases, it has a more intimate relationship to personal and domestic routines in others. Curator Ben Borthwick developed a project whereby he would photograph the view out of his window from his home in Plymouth before going through a familiar parental routine of waking up his daughter for school.

Borthwick’s compulsive photography shows how responsive artistic practice can be to the structure of responsibilities. Borthwick doesn’t consider this activity an ‘art project’. Unlike the conceptual artists he admires, like Eleanor Anton, Teching Hsieh and Bernd & Hilla Becher, there is no intention ascribed to Borthwick’s images, no temporality through which they will be defined as a series. Rather, they are part of a wider process – one which will end when Ben’s daughter no longer needs her father to wake her up, when his family move house, or any other changes.

The responsiveness between practice and routine demonstrates the importance of personal systems for artists. For those graduating art school and entering into professional life as artists, the need for rules, structures and systems to sustain one’s practice becomes even more apparent. Without the affordances of the institution – the availability of studio space, the structured time and directives to make – how does one fit art around the responsibilities of one’s life? What are the pressures on time, money and space, and how can these be reconfigured to create the space needed for making? What does the work itself need in order to be made?

It can be helpful for artists to consider the kind of work they want to make and what resources, routines and structures are required to maintain such a practice. However, like any good system, it needs to remain responsive and open – to play and to experimentation.

Through the repetition of an action, we can find new meaning. When an artist chooses to do something over and over again, the way in which we read the work is altered. A seemingly meaningless or pointless action can become meaningful, perhaps even profound. In Collard’s words, ‘A studied object becomes a different object.’²

Even when the time and space to make presents itself, repetition and routine offer a productive approach to making. Of his routine, Collard says:

I think at the time I used routine as a rudder to navigate the seas of having a stressful life and working without a studio. Today, working in my studio as a full-time artist, I think the routine of daily practice is more about giving oxygen to the work I want to make. I’m interested in making systems that allow me to manage my eclectic tendencies.

Where repetition was once a strategy to create reliable conditions under which to make art, it has now become the basis of Collard’s practice – a way in which to give structure to his interests and ideas. While continuing a daily drawing practice, Collard has also developed a practice based in collaboration with technology, adapting CNC and laser pointer machines to create drawing tools that respond to his instruction. Rather than limiting outcomes, the programmed nature of the machines instead opens up endless possibilities for play and experimentation, demonstrating how the repeated conditions of making can provide rich grounds for sustaining and developing a practice.

For Borthwick, his curiosity about why artists work with repetition, coupled with his interest in repetitive image-making, are crucial considerations to why he continued his photographic series. For the artist-educator, it is a different way of approaching a question that has long been of interest – namely, how changing variables within an image, or the conditions of making the image, start to affect the dynamics between the person taking the photograph and the image itself, and  further between the image and people who see it.

What repetition and routine afford an artistic practice is the same ‘study’ of the conditions and variables of making; enough distance to ascertain what conditions enable the making of work, and what happens when those conditions are tweaked, just so. Where repetition structures artistic practices, it also reveals what drives – and develops – a practice: slight variations of action, those ‘small quiet things’,³  that gain pace over an extended period to make up something greater than the sum of its parts.

^{Image: Andee Collard, daily drawing from 2 February 2013. Courtesy of the artist.}

1. Russell Martin, ArtQuest, in Springboard: The Opportunities and Challenges on the Other Side of Graduation, 2022.
2. Repeat Repeat (Freelands Foundation, 2019), 14.
3. Rachel Jones, artist, in Springboard, 2022.

Repeat Repeat was an exhibition held at Freelands Foundation from 24 January – 2 March 2019 and an accompanying publication investigating ideas of daily practice and repeated routine while addressing questions relating to domesticity, parenting and occupation. It featured work by Ben Borthwick, Nicky Britton Field, Joseph Cartwright, Andee Collard, Peter Dreher, Susan Hiller, and Simon Wells and William Swift Wells.

Where We Work was an exhibition held at Freelands Foundation from 16 January – 18 January 2020 that explored the relationship between teaching art and maintaining an artistic practice through photographs and texts produced by the ARTISTEACHER forum. Depicting the spaces where they ‘make work’, from dedicated studio spaces to school classrooms and less conventional sites, the photographs and texts spoke to the ways in which artist educators create personal systems to maintain the balance between teaching and an independent practice, while raising broader questions about what we think of as space and why it is important for artists.

Springboard: The Opportunities and Challenges on the Other Side of Graduation was a panel discussion featuring Rachel Jones, Russell Martin and Ellie Pennick, and chaired by Kirsty Ogg, that was held to coincide with the 2022 Freelands Painting Prize. Responding to the conditions facing emerging artists after graduation, ranging from increasingly high living costs to a lack of affordable studio space, the panel surveyed the challenges that face contemporary graduates whilst highlighting systems and structures that can support artists embarking in the field.