n the Summer of 2013 artist Bruce McLean and writer Mel Gooding, as Knife Edge Press, were invited to undertake a residency at Cooper Gallery DJCAD. Having unavoidable commitments elsewhere, Gooding and McLean proposed an Invisible Residency, for which on each day of the residency they would be absent presences, exchanging at a distance text and image. These email exchanges were projected day by day on to the wall of the gallery, and later published in book form in 2017. During the four-week residency there emerged themes that made the notion of an ‘invisible residency’ peculiarly appropriate: the idea of art as both visible and invisible; the notion that meaning in art is a hidden energy, generated by thought, feeling and a multi-faceted discourse that requires no academic constraints, but which might be informal as well as formal, personal as well as critical.