Research trip to Azzano, Italy, July 2021.

In 2020 I was awarded the Valerie Gleeson Development Bursary, based on my proposal for a research trip to the marble-quarrying region of Northern Italy. Like so much else that year, the trip was postponed several times. I eventually made it in July 2021. While there, I stayed at Campo del’Altissimo art school. I explored abandoned marble quarries, visited stone-carving studios and learned how to carve marble for the first time. I wrote about my experience of approaching this new material for the first time and about some contemporary artists who work in marble. That writing became the third chapter of a research paper about the relationship between artists and their materials. A shortened version of that chapter was published in The Visual artists Ireland Newsheet in May/June 2022 under the title ‘Peeling the Stone’.