Joya: AiR / Pardeep Nijjar / GBR

‘I arrived at Joya: AiR to reconnect with a craft I had been struggling to reignite.

This wonderful residency has the ability to suspend time. My only marker of time here, is the solar ascent and descent. There is time (without being located in time) for awe. Awe in the landscape, the scale of it, from up high as lower and lower into the valley; the shifting light, the details, the sounds – my favourite being the silence. Not the manufactured silence of ear buds and noise cancelling headphones or simply a lack of traffic, but silence that is palpable. How can silence be the absence of sound when the silence is so vast and so void that it sits upon me, heavy, lead-like, a natural vacuum. A silence that is magnetic – polar attraction – the positive and negative side to the butt end of emotions. Emotions that are central to creating art. A silence and space, endless space that creates a sense of suspension in time.

I thought I needed to remove myself from distractions in order to write. But actually, being here, what I have learned is that the distractions need only be conducive to writing, not absent. The distractions here are the details in the splitting almond on the tree outside my studio window. The vulture hovering ahead. The hourly movement of the sun across the window. The moments of silence. When distractions are so sweet, so precious like these, they need a new word to describe them – no longer distractions, they are the writer’s stimuli. My time at Joya has stimulated my writing in a way I had hoped, but couldn’t have imagined.

Pardeep Nijjar

Pardeep lives in Nottingham and holds a BA in Arabic and International Relations and an MA in Diplomacy.
He is a project consultant Civil Servant for Central government by day and a writer by passion.