Another incredible residency group have come and gone, marking the end of this year’s summer residency programme. Thanks to Kate Squires, Kerri Jefferis & Sophie Chapman, Marloes Staal, Megan Rudden and Rachel Sharpe for all the conversations, making, walking, potlucks and saunas. We hope to see you all at SSW again in the future.
The summer residency group was also joined by India Harvey, one of this year’s selected artists for the Lumsden Residency. India will be returning to SSW in October to prepare and deliver a project as part of the Lumsden Weekender on the 3 & 4 November 2018.
It is exciting to see research, thinking and work produced on residency spilling out of SSW into the wider world, as each resident heads off and onwards to new projects. Kerri Jefferis and Sophie Chapman, artists who work exclusively through collaborations, reflect on their residency here and where it will take them next:
“Whilst at SSW we have been asking ourselves questions about how bodies orientate in the world and what shapes them as well as what implicit structures disallow or limit their desire or difference. Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology has helped us contextualise and better articulate our initial feelings and over the past month we have managed to make a experimental constellation of sympoietic tools in bronze, ceramics and wood. Half utilitarian, half sensuous – we plan to use these propositional objects as a basis for developing new movement based work with collaborators Kyla Harris, Serena Morgan and Zuleika Lebow later this year.
For now, we are imagining the objects held, hooked, hinged, stretched and suspended with fabric beside and intertwined with bodies, creating both micro and macro infrastructures in space. The dialogue (verbal and non-verbal) surrounding the objects ‘use’ is very important to us and through their activation we will be asking things like how do bodies ‘matter’ in what objects do and whether or not tools that dis or re-orientate allow us to think differently, together about presence, becoming, direction and relationality in all their messy ramifications.”
Images with thanks to Yvonne Billimore, Kerri Jefferis and Sophie Chapman.
