Personal space: Max Zaska reflects on his Navigator residency at Ballina Arts Centre

I have learned to be incredibly fast and efficient with my time which is great for practical tasks but doesn't leave a lot of room for deep creative exploration. So when I found out I got the Navigator award and had an entire week to myself just to write music, I was absolutely buzzing!

Most of my work in the past few years has been collaborative and my goal for the residency was to explore my own personal ideas and concepts again which felt so nice to do. The space I was given to work in was absolutely incredible with panoramic views of the Moy river where I could watch salmon jumping in the water and fishermen living their best lives trying to catch them.

The Salmon Festival was on all week while I was there which was much bigger than I imagined, lots of great events and festivities happening around the town which were lovely to go explore and take a break from my writing when I was hitting a wall. I got to explore some tech while I was there too with a new midi keyboard, Splice online production suite and my Helix LT guitar pedal too. All of these gave me unique and new sounds to play with and I found the things I wrote were very different sounding which I was really enjoying.

One of the highlights for me was putting on a guitar workshop and getting to meet a lot of the local players. It was the first workshop I had given in a few years but I really enjoyed it and I feel the players got a lot of out it too.

At the end of the week, my family got to come down and join me for the last 2 days which was such a lovely end to the trip. They booked us a gorgeous AirBnB right in the middle of the town and we all got to explore Ballina together during the day and I would continue my writing in the evenings / early mornings. This is such a great thing as it can be a lot of strain on the partners of artists to hold down the fort at home while we off doing these lovely creative adventures so it was great that this was taken into account.

All in all, it was a beautifully productive and wholesome week. The director of Ballina Paul was such a great and kind host and all his staff were incredibly helpful too.