We are delighted to announce Alex Sarkisian, Breanne Johnson, Claye Bowler, Ocean Lorraine and Ruby Allen as our first group of artists selected for Group Residency 2026.
The SSW team are supporting the artists in developing their practices over the course of their month-long residency this July. Alongside inductions and support in ceramics, metalwork, blacksmithing and stonework, Group Residency includes a collective programme of walks, sauna, film nights, potluck meals, artist sharings and peer learning.
Find out about our first cohort of Group Residency artists for 2026 and their work below:
Alex Sarkisian is a visual artist based in Glasgow, working mainly with lens-based media and the materials that tend to it. Their work looks at disruptions in historical narratives, allegorical reflections and at times humorous interjections as forms of refusing coercive states. They’re curious about the unfolding of multiple timelines concurrently, and how they cling to and linger in material traces – us, soil, minerals, soundscapes, pixels. And how landscapes are active sites where knowledge is both a fragile undercurrent and an unwavering surface. Their recent work kar explores the delicate survival of Western Armenian ancestral places, moving through the Armenian Highlands now within the borders of Turkey.
Recent projects and residencies have been with: Timespan (2025/26), ICA Yerevan (2024), ACSL Yerevan (2024), Art Basis Gyumri (2024), Glasgow International (2021, 2018, 2016), Index Festival (2019), Intermedia Gallery CCA (2018). Sarkisian was a Committee Member at Transmission Gallery (2016/17) and is currently on the Board of Market Gallery. They are a plotholder at Merrylee Allotments, where a lot of the thinking takes place.
Breanne Johnson is an artist and designer working in Mexico City. She holds a Masters of Fine Art in 3D Design from Cranbrook Academy of Art and Bachelor of Art degrees in Visual Art and Political Science from the University of Chicago. Breanne shares citizenship with the United States and Curaçao. Her practice focuses on phenomenological furniture, objects, spaces, happenings and provisionally scaled architectures that examine our relationship to the social and physical spaces we inhabit. She thinks critically about the objects and infrastructures that inform our daily domestic practice, paying particular attention to their emotional resonance. Earlier this summer Breanne participated in D-O-T-S’ Cuisine Banale/Common Kitchen. Breanne was a 2024 Artist-in-Residence with Praksis Oslo, a 2023 Open Studio Resident with Haystack School, the recipient of the 2023 CAA Ox-Bow School Award, the 2022 Pophouse Design Fellow, and a 2021 Artist-in-Residence with Chop Wood Carry Water.
Claye Bowler – My work is driven by questions around memory – how it is held, how it is altered, and who gets to decide what is worth keeping. I am interested in memory as something that exists through objects, land, and the body itself.
Recently, singing and folk songs has become an important part of my practice. I’m currently thinking about the way songs can be collected outside of the body, and as sculpture – wax cylinders, tapes, vinyl – and how these could be reworked in other materials such as ceramic, metal or wax and then could be buried and altered by the land.
I am planning to spend my time at SSW solidifying techniques and exploring new ones, as well as burying all my work in the adjoining landscape, using her as a collaborator.
clayebowler.com
Ocean Lorraine is a visual artist based in Arizona, USA and Osaka, Japan. Her work merges ceramic and stone sculpture, drawing, theater, textiles, sound design, photography, music, printmaking, and film, and unfolds at the crossroads of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic. Her approach is linked to an art of metamorphosis; deeply-researched, poetic conceptions guided by intuition, shape, and sound, evolving into encounters with sensitive environments that generate new possibilities.
Her most recent works as a playwright and sound designer are conceived as abstract, theatrical rituals and are often presented as an interdependence of humans, biological forms, organic materials, and modern and ancestral technologies that change composition. They provoke an investigation of certain vernacular rites and complex realities of Afro-Indigenous Peoples in the Americas, revealing the role that some alternative cosmogonies play in our society. In and through her practice, she seeks to release fixed parameters that exert control over time, thought, space, desire, and movement — stimulating a new understanding of the dynamics that regulate our relationship with reality.
oceanbydesign.com
Ruby Allen, who sometimes performs under the names bury and nella, is an artist and vocalist working with the yelps, textures and rhythms of sound, sculpture and text.
Drawing on practices of collectivity and storytelling, she is interested in both the resistance and tenderness found across the worlds of dub, punk and folk, the ocean, the sky and the oracular.
