We are delighted to announce Alaya Ang, Holly Bobisuthi, Jonny Walker, Kishita Nayyar and Nicky May Bolland as our first group of artists selected for Group Residency 2025.
The SSW team look forward to supporting the artists in developing their practices over the course of their month-long residency. 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.
Below we share more information about the first cohort of Group Residents joining us this month:
Alaya Ang is a visual artist whose practice explores material memory and how materials and objects carry personal and collective histories. Working across textiles, sculpture, and sound, their work centres on the intersections of labour, migration, and ecology.
Through participatory approaches and tactile engagement, Alaya uses workshopping as a method to engage with sites and communities. Their practice centers the overlooked histories of labour, penal colonies and plantation economies, uncovering the complex relationships between people, materials, and place.
Holly Bobisuthi is a California-born artist and metalsmith, exploring the intersections of ritual, history, and self-image. Raised in the redwood forest of the Santa Cruz mountains, she has always been fascinated by archeology and folklore. Engaging with historic forms of craft she creates works that emphasize and encourage a fully embodied human experience. She invites the viewer to fully immerse themselves in her imagined mythic worlds by creating installations that include adornments, sculptures, and domestic objects.
She lives in Oakland, California with her partner and their terrier.
Jonny Walker (b. 1994) is an artist based in Glasgow working primarily in sculpture. His work explores influence, permeability and tension, led by an interest in sites of interaction between individuals, objects and wider systems.
Jonny graduated from DJCAD in 2017. Recent projects include: ‘A shard in my eye’, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, ‘Where a Castle Meets the Sky’, Glasgow International, ‘Divinity’, Transmission Gallery and ‘Platform:2022’, Institut Français d’Ecosse. He has taken part in residencies at Hospitalfield, Arbroath and Artnshelter, Tokyo.
Kishita Nayyar is a London-based ceramic artist exploring the shifting self in contrast to fixed cultural traditions. Her vessels carry memory, history, and inherited expectations. Through material experimentation and sculptural forms, she navigates the space between belonging and personal liberation—questioning what we inherit and how it continues to shape us.
Nicky May Bolland is an inter-disciplinary artist based in Perthshire. She combines sculptural materials and print-making techniques in novel ways. Nicky’s work is concerned with relationships and entanglements: inter-species, inter-generational, inter-cultural. She is curious about how we relate to our worlds and each other: how can our interactions disrupt and re-imagine the stories we tell?
The Group Residency artists are joined by RSA Residencies for Scotland artist Jodi de Bigre and Open Access Residency artist Marianne Mulvey.
