Following our recent open call, SSW and Counterflows Festival are delighted to be supporting the following artists to undertake the SSW x Counterflows Caregivers Residency in 2026:
Alicia Matthews
Belladonna Paloma
Katie Schwab
Olive Jones
Shiori Usui
These 5 fully funded residencies are made possible with the generous support of the William Grant Foundation and Creative Scotland.
The selection panel included previous SSW x Counterflows Caregivers Residency artists Juliana Capes, Keng Keng Tang, Oren Shoesmith & Rabindranath X Bhose, as well as Sam Trotman & Anna Lomas from SSW and Alasdair Campbell & Fielding Hope from Counterflows Festival.
While on this residency:
Alicia Matthews will be developing ceramic work that responds to Ursula Le Guin’s essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction and learning more about ceramic instruments, specifically ocarina pipes and whistling vessels. ‘I’ve been pouring over this essay recently as it speaks to this idea I have about inadvertent vessels: objects including the human body that can and do hold things inside them (despite it not being the object’s primary function).’
Belladonna Paloma will be ‘exploring sculptural supports for her fabric paintings, playing with wheels, frames, and tents, as well as wearable ceramic wounds.’
Katie Schwab ‘will be experimenting with forms of motion and material transformation: shaping mobile metal forms that swing, twist and chime, and testing clay surfaces with ash glazing, raku and smoke firings.’
Olive Jones will re-engage with the sculptural elements of her practice as well as take time to learn new skills in the workshop spaces. ‘I want to connect to my strengths and dive deep into elements within my practice which can end up being peripheral in the everyday.’
Shiori Usui ‘would like to dig in deeper into a personal journey of grieving for my father’s recent passing through reading books about grieving and death, by trying out some grieving rituals, by remembering and grieving for him through dancing and music, and by starting the creative process of a solo performance work using the insights and ideas I gain from all these processes.
I am also really excited to be able to attend the Counterflow Festival in Glasgow in 2026 and meeting with other artists as it will definitely open up my mind and ears as a musician and an improviser.’
We look forward to welcoming all five artists and supporting them while on residency.
About the Artists
Alicia Matthews is an artist and audio maker living and working in the Outer Hebrides.
Past projects have used moving image, performance, sculpture and sound to explore technological hauntings, societal glitches, common land, geology and deep time – often as speculative fictions. Recent work uses haptics, text, drawing and ceramics to investigate the maternal body, witches, The Gaelic Otherworld and relationships between rusting detritus and blanketing bog.
Previous work has been exhibited and performed across the UK – including at Glasgow Tramway, Camden Arts Centre, Tate Modern and Tate Britain – as well as internationally at galleries and festivals in Lublin, Venice, Guangzhou and New York. Alicia holds an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art and an MSc in Sound Design and Audio-Visual Practice from Glasgow University.
Past compositions have been commissioned by platforms including Jerwood Resonance, Present Futures and Radiophrenia.
Musical projects include Malaizy (Few Crackles), SUE ZUKI (Domestic Exile), LAPS (DFA records, MIC records) and Organs of Love (Optimo Music). Alicia co-runs the independent record label Domestic Exile and hosts a long-standing monthly show on NTS radio.
In October 2025, Alicia & Robbie Thomson founded HAAR Projects, an arts organisation focussing on the production of ambitious visual and sonic art projects that engage communities across the Western Isles.
Belladonna Paloma is a disabled trans artist, poet, tattooist and computer-game designer living in Shetland, UK. She makes work inhabited by toilet gods and necromancy, through painting and poetry. Her current research is driven by a trans & crip reading of Christian myth and mysticism, wetlands and crossroads.
A few places her work has been published, shown or performed recently are: ToiToiToi, Basel, Switzerland (2025); LungA School, Iceland (2025); Generator Projects, Dundee (solo exhibition, 2024); Glasgow International, in collaboration with Rabindranath X Bhose and Oren Shoesmith (2024); Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, Norway (2024); Whitechapel Gallery, London, with Daniella Valz Gen (2024); The Overkill Festival, Netherlands, with Uma Breakdown (2023); IMT Gallery, London (2023); Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, with Bhose and Shoesmith (2023).
Katie Schwab is an artist working predominantly with textiles. Her artworks are stitched, woven, tufted and knitted. These processes also inform her sculptures, prints and installation works. Her practice draws on historic textiles to reflect on moments of personal and social turbulence. Developed through research in archives, community or family settings, her work responds to histories of illness, migration or loss. Schwab’s hand-made and collaborative works process these changes, exploring forms of material repair and affective transformation.
Recent exhibitions and projects include; a cloud + a fence, The Line, London (2024); British Art Show 9, Hayward Gallery Touring (2021-22); small wares, Vleeshal, Middelburg, The Netherlands (2021); A Working Building, The Gallery at Plymouth College of Art, Plymouth (2019) and This Interesting and Wonderful Factory, Clore Sky Studio Commission, Tate St Ives, St Ives (2018). Her catalogue Sample Book, designed by Åbäke and edited by Clare Molloy, was co-published by Vleeshal and Dent-De-Leone in 2023.
Olive Jones is a multi-disciplinary artist working across body-based practice, sound and somatic exploration. She works through the mediums of image making, sculpture, video, movement, research and writing to explore the materiality of feelings, especially in relation to domestic spaces.
Recent works include the publication Lungwort which explores memory, grief, human/non-human worlds, trauma, joy, and the wild magic sensorial experience of being alive. As well as a short film about her experience of neurodivergent single motherhood.
Originally from Japan, Shiori Usui is a BBC Proms commissioned composer, improvising musician (piano & voice), and performer and performance maker in theatre.
Shiori’s background is contemporary music composition, and she has produced works in radical instrumental music, working with numerous international ensembles and orchestras including BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (UK), Collegium Novum Zurich (Switzerland), Philharmonisches Orchester Cottbus (Germany), A Far Cry (USA), Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, the pianist Katherine Tinker (UK), and Plus-Minus Ensemble (UK).
Shiori has also worked with motion capturing sensors and biophysical technology along with her colleagues. Many of her compositions are inspired by the sounds of the human body, the deep sea, and many other weird and wonderful organisms living on Earth.
Shiori has worked as a performer/musician in theatre shows such as Sound Symphony for/with disabled young people by Ellie Griffith (2019 & 2022), Float for babies and their grown-ups by Kerry Cleland (2026) and Dussskk for neurodivergent teenagers by Claire Willoughby (2026). Shiori is also creating her own sensory theatre show happening in hydro-pool for/with disabled people and their families/carers, which has music and sound as the core materials.
As an improvising musician, Shiori has performed with artists and groups such as Seth Bennett, Ceylan Hay, Grey Area, Rie Nakajima, Lee Patterson, Arve Henriksen, Ilan Volkov and New String Ensemble.
