Residencies

Artist in Residence Programme

The Shop operates two levels of residency:

The Full Visiting Artist Scheme

The placement will run for one year – from September to September. Selected artists will be able to use the studio space in The Shop for free. At the end of the residency, the artist hosts an exhibition of their work.

The Short Visiting Artist Scheme

This placement runs for 2 months. At the end of the residency the artist will be given an area of the Shop in which to display their work. They are also be required to negotiate 4 x 4hr slots per week where they are available to open the shop for other users. The aim of this residency is to provide a space in which to develop work and experiment with ideas. The exhibition may include a series of maquettes / designs or proposals for future work as well as completed pieces.

Please download the Artist in Residence application form / information sheet for further details.

Current artists in Residence

The current artists in Residence are Anji Jackson-Main and Loreto Valenzuela

Artists' Statements

September 2009 - June 2009 - Loreto Valenzuela

On Paintings: I'm interested in capturing spontaneous movements (in flow) when applying plaster to canvas. There are some fascinating insights on capturing these movements that start from a spontaneous unconscious states of mind (to a process of reflecting thoughts...) as the brushes move through the canvas these movements become less unconscious -the mind starts to associate images changing the outcome of the painting. My work is 'abstract' with a focus on the movements of a dimensional body, referring itself not quite directly to the body but allowing room for re-interpretation: "a wandering brain to a brain talking"

On live art performances and installations: I am fascinated by the practical processes of creating performances, although my main focus is the practice, theory too is a crucial part of it. Within my practice I discovered that theory and practice present complexities, yet exhilarating and stimulating negotiations between the two. Of course when creating performances it is important to engage and experiment with theoretical and philosophical ideas that influence the practice, however, in this I also find that the inverting of methods; practice informing theory, fascinates me.

Previous artists in residence

June 2008 - June 2009 - Miriam Austin

Fascinated by dreams and theories of the unconscious, my work is created instinctively, developing a poetic understanding of materials and their symbolic significance. Using familiar objects and substances associated with our everyday experience, I hope to weave narratives that elicit very personal responses within viewers. I also work with video, photography and performance to create installations that engage the audience in a physical, sensual experiences.

I seek, as Helen Chadwick describes, a “resolution between the transient and transcendent”, the personal and the collective. The work exists in precarious relationship with its surroundings and I am inevitably drawn to work with fragile, ephemeral materials. Fine clay forms crack and collapse, jelly disintegrates, fat melts, fruit rots, treacle creeps, leaks and corrodes. Poised on the cusp of wholeness and brokenness, ripe beauty and decay, I sense the ‘perfect’ moments of harmony and beauty are more tangible, more urgent, precisely because they are so momentary and so vulnerable.

Miriam Austin makes installation, sculpture, performance and video. Always 'live' in some sense, her work explores materials that change state over time, concerned with the emotive and symbolic qualities of the scenarios she creates. Working instinctively, she weaves ordinary, everyday materials into strange, evocative landscapes. Often choosing to physically inhabit these environments, her presence (often static and silent) develops narratives which are always bound up in the ephemeral nature of the materials and forms, in their shifting states of dissolution, growth, evaporation or decay.

January–February 2009 — Sarah Lüdemann

“I know that I exist; the question is, what is this ‘I’ that I know?” (Descartes) - It is this idea of the searching for the ‘self’ that I am working from. I am fascinated by the experience of being human, and my artistic practice is an investigation of humanity from the different angles of personality, physicality and identity, and of how these interconnected notions manifest themselves in human behavior and appearance.

My paintings and photographs are more intimate and inward-gazing and explore identity through the body as a malleable form or shape that can be extended or reduced, placed or misplaced in relation to itself in order to allude to the morphological aspects of identity and suggest the existence of a multiple self. Identity as such is ever evolving and subject to both physical and mental metamorphosis.

My performance and installation work, on the other hand, engages in concepts that more widely shape our identity such as language or social roles and constructs. It is rather extrovert and executed on a larger scale. All those works usually involve collaboration with artists and non-artists and extend identity beyond the body and inner dialogue into more complex manifestations of identity within society.

Although my work is personal, or autobiographical and often makes use of my own body, it is not necessarily my own identity that I want to depict, but conceptions of identity that could be deemed universal, forms that are more generally relevant and open to identification. My incessant and particular questioning of identity is the product of a practice already spanning five countries and fueled by an unquenchable curiosity to discover more.

I find it stimulating and refreshing to work with various different mediums, making use of that which seems most suitable for each individual project. Painting, however, is my primary medium and it appears to have strongly influenced my work in all other mediums so that even within my video work there is a clear focus on the visuality and the painterly aspects of the image rather than the narrative, which allows the spectator to project their own story line onto them. Still, both the concept and the visual aspect play a vital role in my works as I aspire to create experiences that are at once sensual and thought provoking.

For more information please see: Sarah Lüdemann - www.camba.org.uk

www.franklynjones.com/SarahVideo/sinfonia

sarah.luedemann@googlemail.com

February–March 2009 — Emily Taylor

I am the cloud and I am me. My starting point was clouds. I love clouds and want to know why. I want to know everything there is to know about clouds. My starting point became me. How much of our body is just physical?

With a background in Drama Therapy and a degree in Contemporary Devised Theatre from Dartington College of Arts, my work is concerned with the feelings we get from making artwork and how this is similar to life experiences. It is about emotional response. For example I love clouds and the sky in the same way I love making and performing and in both cases can’t describe this feeling or why. How do our emotions and memories affect who we are and in the case of artists, affect the kind of artwork we create? Over the last year I have often returned to a statement from Anthony Gormely “I use it because it is the only bit of the material world I happen to be inside”. And it is that which is exactly the reason why I use my own experiences and want to explore my own body in this next stage of my CLOUDS project; we are our bodies therefore to start to understand the world outside we must first try to understand ourselves.

Having grown up in Somerset and lived for the past 3 years in Devonshire, a lot of my work looking at the sky is linked to being high up on hills. Now living in Cambridge I am interested to exploring the flatness of the land and how the sky here is different. I will look at how and if this affects my response to it.

Over the next year I will be: researching, photographing, writing, exploring, asking, moving, sculpting, and being.

Future artists in residence

An updated list of artists in residence will be posted shortly...