Olive Jones, one of the five 2025 SSW x Counterflows Caregivers Residency artists, reflects on her time here at SSW in April and May 2026.
The SSW x Counterflows Caregivers Residency was set up in 2020 to expand funded residency opportunities to artists who are also caregivers.
Words below by Olive Jones, images by Olive Jones and SSW.
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It feels difficult to make my experience of SSW into something linear. Looking back at my time on residency, there was a sense of time-travelling. A lot of what I found myself doing and engaging with were things that I had been thinking about for a long time, but hadn’t had the space or conditions to properly explore. I didn’t expect that things would unfold in these ways, linking back to questions that had been forming for years.
Some things feel too close and vulnerable to share and I do not want to try to quantify the experiences, discoveries and journeys that I had into something linear, so I’ve compiled a note form sketch of how it felt to be at SSW and the questions that came up.
Days of preparation
Decision paralysis
Acceleration of time
Uncertainty
Packing panic
Themes planning what to make
Making the most
Being present
How to maximise the time
How to rest
How to pause
How to step away, when to step in
Taking myself seriously
Not taking myself too seriously
Graveyard visit
Shoe remembrance
Remembering
Play
Dawn
Diving swallows and swifts spring brings
Train station and back
Forked tail silhouettes
Reconnecting with older themes and remembering
Making new friends
Care in many forms
Insects resting on dewy grass
Frustration
Shared cigarettes
Abandon to a process
Dandelions
Burning
Missing home
Enjoying space
Slippery clay
Bending metal, finding limits
Hypnotic clay bird bath trance
Sketches
Reverberations
Telepathy
Exchange
Support
Dry hands
Sadness
Loose beads
Found
Cyan
Kiln explosions
Pizza nightmare
Pouring
Singed horsehair
Chandelier confusion
Grinding patterns
Repeats
Malleable
Doubles
Chalky marks
Pylons
Dreams
Eggs
Cherry sweets
Sleepless nights
Clay frog
Disturbing events
Technology
Disembodiment
Embodiment
Housing application forms
Bureaucracy
More applications
Dopplegangers
Celestial
Nocturnal
Lavender mist
Found moving air
Pods following transmitter
Pausing, reinvigorating
Upside down house on the hill
Restless built up energy
Tiny lizard herding
Connections
Joy
Space for
Finding pathways
And profound material connection
Presence
Support and encouragement of joy
And the guilt of stepping away for a while
From the grind of getting on with things
Gratitude and gratitude again
For acknowledging care
Time to process the pain in the lack of recognition
I am profoundly grateful to everyone at SSW and Counterflows for the care, thought and generosity that has been put into this residency. It has been a sanctuary for me.
The experience brought into focus the profound importance of recognition, and the systemic lack of recognition and support for those who care for others in our society. It also made me think about how much the art world continues to exclude so many.
There was grief in stepping out of my everyday environment and having the realisation of how much of this has been internalised as personal failings over the years.
Caregiving is an overarching job that quite literally holds the world together, yet at the same time it is invisibilised. So for me, the significance of the Caregivers Residency goes beyond the time and space, it is also in the symbolic valuing of care, which feels like such a rare thing.
