Self-Funded Artist Research Residency

IN–YO: A Journey Between Miró, Haiku & Raku

Barcelona, Spain | 17–31 August 2026

This self-funded research period in Barcelona is a self-directed artistic residency undertaken to deepen my ongoing investigation into the relationship between nature, abstraction, gesture, poetry and Japanese aesthetics. The research will directly inform the development of a new body of work for my forthcoming participation in FOCUS Art Fair at Saatchi Gallery, London, October 2026, within my curatorial project IN–YO: A Dialogue with Nature.

A central focus of the research will be the work and practice of Joan Miró, particularly his relationship with poetry, gesture, automatism, nature and Japanese artistic thought. I will undertake focused study at the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, examining paintings, drawings, ceramics, sculpture and archival/contextual material. Miró’s first visit to Japan in 1966 was an important turning point in his mature practice; the Fundació Joan Miró identifies the journey as decisive, particularly in relation to his increasingly expressive use of black and its association with Japanese calligraphic gesture.

Miró’s long-standing interest in Japanese culture also provides an important point of connection with my own research. His encounter with Japanese ceramics, calligraphy and artistic thought, together with his collaboration with ceramicist Josep Llorens Artigas, demonstrates how an artist can absorb another cultural language without simply imitating it. Miró’s first journey to Japan took place in 1966, when he was 73; during his two-week visit he travelled to Kyoto and Nara, visited Ryoan-ji and traditional pottery centres, and met the poet Shūzō Takiguchi.

Alongside Miró, I will investigate Haiku as a form of visual and poetic reduction: the ability to distil an observation of nature into a concentrated moment, leaving space for contemplation and interpretation. I am particularly interested in how the principles of brevity, silence, seasonality and suggestion can be translated from poetry into semi-abstract painting.

A third strand of the research will explore Raku ceramics, focusing on impermanence, chance, fire, texture and transformation. This connects closely with my interest in Wabi-Sabi and the beauty of imperfection. Miró’s own extensive engagement with ceramics—including his collaboration with Artigas and his later ceramic murals—provides an additional bridge between painting, materiality and Japanese-inspired practice.

During the residency I will maintain a visual research journal, make drawings and compositional studies, record observations, experiment with gesture, colour and texture, and develop ideas for new circular semi-abstract landscapes.

The objective is not to reproduce Miró, Haiku or Raku aesthetics, but to translate their underlying principles into my own visual language.

The research will therefore form a bridge between nature and abstraction, poetry and painting, gesture and stillness, imperfection and beauty, contributing directly to the development of new work for IN–YO: A Dialogue with Nature at FOCUS Art Fair, Saatchi Gallery, London (15th  – 18th October 2026).

The purpose of the research is not to reproduce the visual language of Miró or Japanese art, but to investigate how their underlying principles of reduction, gesture, silence, impermanence and poetic observation can be translated into my own contemporary language of semi-abstract landscape.