In January we welcomed the first of our two Winter Residency groups in 2020. Artists Eloïse Dieutegard, Cassia Dodman, Fionn Duffy, David Moré and Leila Alice Smith lived and worked together on site for four weeks, forming close relationships (with each other, the site, staff team, processes, materials and surrounding landscape) and developing their diverse practices.
This year’s Winter Residency call out focused on the role of making and materiality in a time of climate breakdown. Building on thinking and research from projects, together with knowledge and learning from the workshops, we wanted to give attention to the messy overlaps between the making skills we foster at SSW and the skills needed to “stay with the trouble” (Haraway, D. 2017).
We started with questions; how can a multi-species discourse inform future material practices? Can we develop new material knowledges and making skills in ways that resist extractive systems? How can ideas of sympoesis, symbiosis and parasitism inform our relationship with materials? These questions formed a framework for the residency programme, which alongside making in the workshops and studio, attempted to open up and explore relationships with and between each other, materials, the landscape and processes (industrial/pre-industrial), through a series of workshops where residents would come together with invited guests.
The artists were joined by Alexis Zafiropoulos leading a workshop in stone walling, Margaret Kerr who introduced her embodied methodologies for place memory understanding and Borbála Soós, the first speaker in our 2020 Public Talks programme.
The first 2020 Winter Residency ran from Monday 27 January — Monday 24 February 2020.
