Following the open call for our first Caregivers Residency with our wonderful friends and partners at Counterflows Festival, we’re excited to announce that we will be welcoming artists Chris Dooks, Hang Linton and Laura Bradshaw to SSW for month-long funded residencies throughout 2021.
The SSW x Counterflows Caregivers Residency was formed to support artists who undertake essential care work, for family (biological or chosen), community and/or kin, either professionally or informally. We recognise that caregiving responsibilities can both form and disrupt artistic practices, and that a flexible and nourishing residency for artists with caregiving responsibilities is needed to support and value their work and diverse needs.
The selected artists have diverse practices, spanning performance, body work, live art, sound, object making and collaboration.
Chris Dooks creates performative-narrative works that are also disability strategies and place-making projects with ‘artist-as-healer’ themes. On residency at SSW, Chris plans to make sound-objects and pilgrimages, but also hopes that the residency will give opportunity to “re-calibrate” his practice after multiple interruptions over the years.
Hang Linton is an interdisciplinary artist working in music, performance, dance, video and installation. He describes his practice as “a rebellion against clean aesthetics and working underneath capitalist structures which demand high output”. At SSW Hang wants to develop skills in working with wood and metal, and to examine the role that care takes within his work in relation to ideas of Crip Time/Sick Time ( a term used in Taraneh Fazeli’s essay, Notes for Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time) and Access Intimacy (a term created by disability activist Mia Mingus)”.
Laura Bradshaw‘s work often considers the body, its stories and histories. She is interested in what we hold in our bodies and how the life we live and the experiences we have, are stored within our cells and bones. On residency, Laura will explore the choreographic nature of her family’s interdependent relationships and consider the ways a family can be interdependent both functionally and creatively.
The SSW x Counterflows Caregivers residency artists were selected from an Open Call, by Letitia Pleiades (last year’s SSW x Counterflows Residency artist) and Nakul Krishnamurthy (student of South Indian Carnatic music and composer of contemporary electronic music, advisor and musician on Counterflows’ project A Carnatic Paradigm with Mark Fell and Rian Treanor, performed at Counterflows 2017).
Although no outcomes are required from the residency periods, we look forward to sharing what Chris, Hang and Laura get up to when they are on residency, here on our website.
Read more about the SSW x Counterflows Caregivers residency in ArtMag and the Fleming Collection’s blog.
Check out Counterflows online festival, throughout April 2021.
