About the Goetemann Artist Residency | How to Apply
The 2024 Goetemann Artist Residency Program (GAR)
Bringing artists from around the world, the Goetemann Artist Residency Program has long been a staple of the Rocky Neck Art Colony. In 2024 our programs include Sarah McEneaney as the Distinguished Artist/Teacher in August, Caroline Bagenal as the Environmental Installation Artist in September and Loren Doucette as the Gloucester Invitational Artist in October.
Gloucester Invitational Artist: Loren Doucette, October 2024
Thursday, October 10, 7 PM: Opening Talk at The Cultural Center at Rocky Neck (6 Wonson Street, Gloucester)
Sunday, November 3, 1-3PM: Closing Talk/reveal of work-in-process, Cripple Cove Studios (97 East Main Street)
Loren Doucette lives in Gloucester, MA working as a full-time painter. Her work has shown in solo and group exhibitions since 2006. She received a BFA in Drawing and Painting in 2013 from Montserrat College of Art where she participated in Montserrat’s study-abroad program in Italy. It was there that landscape painting became a stabilizing force in her work. Using Oil, Acrylic, Pastel and Gouache, her work includes architectural landscapes unique to Gloucester’s harbor, vibrant floral paintings, emotional figurative work and abstractions that come from the bones of all three subjects. Her paintings are prayers hovering between realism and abstraction and celebrate the sun, flowers, people and color of this world.
My work is a search, an asking, a prayer. Even though the subjects are sometimes recognizable as landscape, flowers or figures, it is about recalibration, remembering, revisiting, reconstruction and discovery. I mainly use three mediums: oil, acrylic and pastel. I use oil for it’s heaviness; the messy squishing and sloshing takes me to more unruly places than acrylic can. I use acrylic on the other hand for it’s vibrancy. It’s quick drying qualities allow me to draw into the work in between paint layers. Finally, pastel is where I draw and construct from flowers and landscape with overlying abstraction and color experimentation.
Within all these mediums, I am searching for a new discovery to unfold both in the materials and spiritual content.
Loren’s website: lorendoucetteart.com
Environmental/Installation Artist, September 2024: Caroline Bagenal
We are pleased to welcome Caroline Bagenal as the 2024 Environmental/Installation Artist for the Goetemann Artist Residency in collaboration with the Ocean Alliance.
My work is inspired by the world around me, particularly the marsh landscape around Newburyport. Though I trained as a painter, I am now primarily a sculptor working on indoor and outdoor projects. The marsh reed phragmites, became my primary material from which I constructed structures inspired by bird blinds, fish traps, fences, haystacks, and Polynesian stick charts. During the pandemic I made a film about the marsh, documenting how the marsh changed over the course of the year. In August 2021 l fell off my bike and broke both arms and jaw. Swimming outdoors became an important element in my recovery and the origin of my new work. Feed from gravity my body becomes a receptor with heightened senses and, for a time, just another being in the ecosystem of the river. In 2022 I made my first swimming sculptures from recycled nets. The next year I made larger swimming sculptures from recycled woven plastic, bubble wrap and other materials that float. My sculptures derive in part from embroidered photographs which function as a kind of drawing with thread which I use to imagine future sculptures.
For the Goetemann Residency, I intend to continue the swimming sculpture project taking it in new directions. I plan to make a film using drones to better convey the idea of the swimmer as part of a vast ocean environment. Future swimming sculptures could be made from materials found on the seashore. I will continue to use embroidery on photographs to explore ideas. My father was a marine biologist. While going through his books and papers I decided to use some of his research for my project in part as a homage to him.
Biography
Caroline Bagenal was born in Scotland and lives in Newburyport, MA, and Cumbria in the UK. She has an MFA in Painting and an MA in Modern Art History, Theory and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been shown widely in both the UK and USA including The Maritime Museum in Liverpool and OIA Gallery, New York. Her work has been reviewed in Boston Art Review, Sculpture Magazine, The Boston Globe, Art New England, Artscope and other publications and is included in both private and corporate collections. She has received numerous awards and artists residencies, most recently in 2023 at Cove Park, Scotland. She was an Associate Professor at Montserrat College of Art for twenty-five years. Caroline’s Website: carolinebagenal.com
