ELAINE GRAINGER REFLECTS ON HER RESIDENCY AT CASA WABI IN PUERTO ESCONDIDO, MEXICO.

While out walking, I was listening to The Mater Podcast, featuring Mexican artist Bosco Sodi and curator Alberto Ríos de la Rosa discussing Fundación Casa Wabi (casawabi.org). I was captivated by the commitment and energy that Sodi and his team pour into this non-profit organisation. In 2014, after successfully commissioning the Japanese architect Tadao Ando to build a residency site on the pacific coast near Puerto Escondido in Oaxaca, Mexico, Casa Wabi was opened. 

Casa Wabi runs six residencies a year, hosting six artists at a time for five-week periods. It also runs a mobile community library, and community film and clay workshops. It has a large gallery space that hosts Mexican and international artists. Its mission is to support artists through residencies and develop relationships between contemporary art and local communities in three locations: Puerto Escondido, Mexico City, and Tokyo. 

I went about researching how to get onto the residency programme. Residencies at Casa Wabi Puerto Escondido are through invitation only, except for one international open call per year. The Casa Wabi X ArtReview Magazine Prize offers three international artists a funded residency for five weeks. 

For the application, you have to propose a community project and submit a portfolio of work. I proposed a project that reflects a shared human impulse to align with the stars, and to live in rhythm with the natural world. This was an outline to be further developed onsite. I researched the area and its natural landscape and studied the indigenous communities of Oaxaca. The more I researched, the more I wanted this residency, but wanting and getting are two different things. So, when I won this highly competitive prize, I knew that the stars were aligned and this would have a significant and lasting impact on me and my practice.

Since graduating with an MA from NCAD in 2018, I have undertaken multiple residencies in different parts of the world. My journey started with the RDS Awards, leading to a three-month residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris in 2019. This was followed by PADA in Portugal in 2021, SIMS in Iceland in 2022, SaikoNeon in Japan in 2024, and PINK in Manchester last year. My practice thrives on residencies. Navigating somewhere new creates an alertness in me, and I seem to absorb so much more sensory information. It gives me time away from a busy family life and allows me to fully connect with my surroundings. 

Although quite used to residencies, nothing prepared me for Casa Wabi. Situated on the beachfront of the Pacific Ocean, the thunderous sounds were constant and surprisingly comforting. The residency has six independent cabins, and the main house is an open-air communal area where we gathered to eat and connect. We had three meals a day, made by an amazing team of local women. We ate communally and the staff sat down for lunch with us daily. We had large individual studios that sheltered us from the sun but kept us linked to the land and the wildlife. The residency is part of an area that has become internationally known for its architectural pavilions and public artworks. There are daily tours for visitors to experience. I accessed these on my daily walks, sought refuge from the sun in them, and got inspired by them. 

My routine started each morning with a run and swim, and then a chat over breakfast with the other residents. After that, I walked the grounds, mapping my movements, gathering sensory information, and making preparations for the community project. My days and weeks held onto this routine and as my connections with the place grew, a site-specific project formed, as well as the community project. The projects overlapped in parts and reached a point of completion on the last week of the residency. The community project took place over two days, when a group of seven participants took turns to perform short, silent walks on the land, mapping movements, observing in-between spaces, creating physical maps together, and forming an artwork, now held in the Casa Wabi Collection. 

Casa Wabi seemed like a dream at times; I feel like it is fading and building in tandem. It is a place to nurture and be nurtured, and I am grateful for the opportunity to have started this conversation with Casa Wabi and Mexico.

Elaine Grainger is an artist based in Dublin.

elainegraingerart.com

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EOGHAN RYAN REPORTS ON HIS PARTICIPATION IN THE DWELL HERE RESIDENCY AT IMMA LAST YEAR.

Thinking back on my time at IMMA, as part of the year-long Dwell Here programme, I returned to a quote that I had included at the end of my original application:

“For us it’s not about possessing the territory. Rather, it’s a matter of increasing the density of communes, of circulation, and of solidarities so that the territory becomes unreadable, opaque to all authority. We don’t want to occupy the territory, we want to be the territory.”¹ 

What that quote proposed in 2011, utopian and gigantic in its conceit, feels much more specific in retrospect. I applied for the Dwell Here residency with a fairly direct intention: to consolidate a body of research and work that considers Ireland’s immediate ‘state’. At the time, I was attempting to do this remotely from Brussels, largely unsuccessfully. The residency at IMMA offered a different set of conditions entirely, not just time and space, but contextualised proximity through a sustained period of living and working, alongside the additional support of critical frameworks, an international community, finances, and a large art institution that, as an Irish millennial artist, I have grown up alongside.

For my practice, living and working within an institution, and the co-dependencies such a position invites, produces both constructive friction and access. The museum becomes not just a site of presentation, but a shell to live in, think through, and spill out from. The IMMA shell also comes with Victorian gardens and 24-hour on-site security.

The residency programme is organised and curated by Janice Hough, who carefully balances the facilitation of critical inquiry with the social and domestic aspects of care that make a year-long residency not just functional, but liveable. The critical inquiry aspect is focused around ‘intensives’. These take the form of curated weeks of workshops, field trips, and practice sharing, bringing together artists from the month-long residencies alongside year-long, live-in and studio residents, as well as invited practitioners.

These intensives are loosely framed around thematic strands relating to Technologies of Peace, The Museum as a Site of Vibration, and The Irish Paradigm, which, in practice, function more as points of departure than fixed frameworks. Outside of the intensives, my focus during the residency was directed toward developing Carceral Jigs (2025), a video installation commissioned by EVA International, and adapting my performance work, Circle A (2024), for the IMMA courtyard.

The production and adaptation of these works, interspersed with the intensives and punctuated by continuous exchange across shared meals, studio visits, pints, walks, and so on, meant conversations unfolded without pressure toward resolution or outcome. It created a rhythm between studio work and collective reflection, both organised and incidental, that retained a particular ambience, a willingness to engage with other practices, to test ideas discursively, and to sit with positions one might not necessarily agree with. I think I was starved of exactly this; thinking together from very different priorities, proximities and formalisms toward common concerns, and having the time to do it properly.

The Circle A performance I developed for the courtyard (with help from Sara Grimes, Boris Charrion, Tomislav Fellner, and Amina Szecsödy) evolved from the strangely fitting particularities of the site – an open quadrangle with a circle in the middle. Although it was independently curated from the residency, its adaptation benefitted greatly from my close proximity, as I was able to look down on it from the staff corridor, whilst picking up my post.

Now that my residency has ended, the rarity of what Dwell Here made possible 

lands hard in a city entrenched in crisis. Dwell Here offers a generous space, however temporary, in which individual practice and collective thinking can unfold alongside one another, each sustaining the other across a genuinely non-homogeneous international set of practices, all in dialogue with the institution.

Dwell Here is an exceptionally well-considered residency programme. It provides a rare set of conditions for artists to live, work, and think alongside one another in the city – conditions that still feel, to a degree, open, provisional, and actively shaped by those participating within them. I would strongly encourage others to apply while it continues to exist.

Eoghan Ryan is an Irish artist based between Brussels and Dublin working across moving image, installation, and performance.

eoghanryan.ie

¹ The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (California: Semiotext(e), 2011) p108. 

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ANNA MACLEOD DISCUSSES HER PREVIOUS PRODUCTION RESIDENCIES AT EDINBURGH SCULPTURE WORKSHOP.

The Uisce / Floraperformative community river walks is the latest phase of my ‘Water Conversations’ series that explores water and land through historical, cultural, and ecological lenses. Water is central to all human and more-than-human life on earth. Historically, water has been critical to the development of towns and cities; however, the positioning of dwellings and industry beside water bodies brought gross pollution and biodiversity loss. It is now known that, globally, freshwater life is facing alarming species loss at rates more severe than on land or in the oceans.

In my home city of Edinburgh, the Water of Leith has been rejuvenated over the past 40 years through multi-agency community trust work.¹ In witnessing the return of life and biodiversity of the water and riparian corridor of this iconic silver thread running through the city, Edinburgh seemed like the ideal spot to develop a transferable model for performative community walking, to celebrate water’s embodied animacy. 

The two-year process of research and development for Uisce / Flora was made possible through two residencies at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop (ESW) in the summers of 2023 and 2024 respectively. The Reach Scotland Residency Programme, organised by Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, is designed for artists working on funded projects that require either the production of final work, or a focused period of research and development (see edinburghsculpture.org). The heavily subsidised residency costs were funded through an Agility Award from the Arts Council of Ireland. 

Founded in 1986 by a group of sculpture graduates from Edinburgh College of Art, ESW was an artist-run organisation for many years, before capital funding was secured to build the Bill Scott Sculpture Centre in Newhaven, which opened in 2012. The Reach Scotland programme at ESW is an excellent living, researching and making environment in the heart of the city, where artists are offered curatorial and technical support, an apartment, a dedicated 24-hour access studio, and access to workshop facilities. The facilities in the state-of-the-art building are supported by a dedicated staff and technical support team; artists working in the workshops have specialist technicians on hand to guide them through multiple sculptural processes in the creation of new work. 

Uisce / Flora was conceived as a ceremonial procession along waterways and riverine paths (with embroidered textile sculptures and cast recycled aluminium staffs), as performative healing of human perceptions towards water, and as an act of interspecies empathy. 

Research for the project involved input from multiple individuals and organisations. At the Wemyss School of Needlework in Fife, I learned crewel embroidery and was introduced to textile designer, Katie May Anderson, who was instrumental in the form of the fabric works, generously sharing her knowledge of plant-based dyeing, pattern cutting, and assembly.² The design of the embroidered riverine plants was drawn from two collections at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh: the extensive Herbarium collection of more than three million preserved specimens; and the Library and Archives collection, where the nineteenth-century John Hutton Balfour teaching diagrams and Brendel teaching models are held. 

At ESW, I was helped by the excellent technical staff through the long and complex processes of ceramic shell, sand casting, and finishing, involved in making the seven cast aluminium staffs, based on Caddisfly cases. Caddisflies (order Trichoptera) are freshwater aquatic invertebrates and indicators of good water quality; they are best known for the portable cases created by their larvae and, as such, are sometimes referred to as ‘underwater architects’. 

Uisce Lite / Flora Edinensis was held in Edinburgh during June 2025 at two venues along the route of the Water of Leith – The Physics Garden at Saughton Park and St Bernard’s Well in Stockbridge. Invited speakers contributed to the walks on health-related subjects including ethnobotany, folklore and mythology, herbalism, and river regeneration. 

A river walk, titled Uisce Sionainn / Flora Liatromensis, was recently performed on 16 May along the River Shannon, as part of my exhibition ‘Tír Breac / Speckled Land’ at The Dock in Carrick-on-Shannon. I was joined by Katie May Anderson, and a talk was delivered by Niall Mac Coitir, author of Ireland’s Wild Plants: Myths, Legends and Folklore (The Collins Press, 2010). A limited edition zine, designed by Padraig Cunningham of Pure Designs Studio, with an illustrated essay by Dr Phillina Sun, was launched at the event.

Anna Macleod is a Scottish / Irish artist, researcher and educator based in Manorhamilton, County Leitrim. 

annamacleod.com

¹ See: The Water of Leith Conservation Trust (waterofleith.org.uk)

² Katie May Anderson is a textile maker, researcher, and educator based in Glasgow (@kmacostume)

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AVRIL CORROON REPORTS FROM AMSTERDAM ON HER ONGOING RESIDENCY AT THE RIJKSAKADEMIE.

I am currently approaching the last six months of my two-year residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. The programme selects on average 23 to 25 artists from an annual open call. The application process entails a written application, portfolio, and video bio, and if pre-selected, two interviews. There is a €50 application fee. Half of the artists are living internationally, and the others are based in Netherlands prior to the residency. In general, artists are usually out of education and working professionally for a number of years.

Residents are supported with individual studios and workshop facilities in an old calvary barracks in east Amsterdam. The size and style of studios vary and are allocated by practice needs; however, this is not without competition. My studio is in the old stables, located beside a canal. The space has both brick and white walls, high ceilings, and big sliding doors to facilitate scale. For me, it’s a beautiful space to think and make in, with changing natural light throughout the day. 

We receive a materials budget and modest but feasible monthly stipend inclusive of rent. Accommodation is provided, with priority given to international artists; these are mostly single flats and some shared apartments around the city. We’re encouraged to apply for state housing supplement, and health insurance is obligatory in the Netherlands.

The facilities at the Rijksakademie are the driver of the residency, with workshops and technical advisors in wood, metal, print, ceramics, casting, media, chemical, and paint. You can leave your studio with an idea, enter a workshop, and often the materials might already be at hand to get testing straight away. The levels of detail and specificity I’ve been able to achieve has been completely engrossing and exciting. 

Lately, I’ve been working predominantly in the metal workshop, forging a series of crowbars, titled Pry (2026), from tool-steel and welding structures, to be lit from within and hanging from a ceiling, holding dehumidifier water in IV bags, titled Sublet Glory (2026). For both works, a number of tools were made specifically by Stephan Kuderna, the workshop technician: a tool to precisely bend bespoke laser-cut brass hooks; a chisel grounded for splitting the crowbar foot; and parts to bend the hot tool steel around for the leverage points. In the Media Lab, with the robotics and electronics technician, Mauricio van der Maesen, we made a lightbulb to the exact length and colour temperature I wanted but couldn’t find commercially. I’ve made multiple clamps to fit ceiling beams that Sublet Glory will hang from, sprayed the steel in the Paint Lab, and finally made the crates in the Woodshop. It’s been empowering to be so hands-on with every aspect of these works and has given me new practical skills and freedom.

On the theoretical and conceptual sides, residents sign up to receive studio visits from artists called ‘advisors’ who come semiregularly. These advisors develop engagement with studio practices and build upon previous conversations, offering criticality, questions and feedback. It’s invaluable to have artists willing to get into the research hole with you as you dig.

Sharing space with so many artists is naturally quite social. To break the ice, the residency year starts with a group bonding trip. Memorably, my first year trip was to the small Dutch island Schiermonnikoog, where we stayed in a very old traditional hotel and did quicksand walking tours, star gazing, and swam in freezing conditions. Many of us have moved to the Netherlands without existing networks or connections to the city, so community-making begins on residency. Cantina, the unofficial social workshop of the Rijksakademie, is where staff and residents gather to eat, talk, and exchange ideas. We are spoiled with a subsidised menu, and we eat by the canal in the sunshine at any opportunity. Friendships started here have sparked weekly morning writing groups, a coding club, and a burgeoning football team. Most importantly, we’ve inherited from alumni a weekly evening crit system and we go to plenty of shows and pubs together.

In terms of outcomes, we have three Internal Open Studios during the year. This is a valuable private opportunity to see each other’s work with all staff and advisors and usually a packed performance programme, followed by a celebratory dinner and party. More intensely, the Rijksakademie consolidates each year with a four-day public Open Studios. Despite this innocent sounding premise, it’s a whopping show of 50 solo presentations and events, receiving a footfall of 5000 visitors. This is a real beast; the pressure is high, entailing a lot of hard work and collaboration across the site. This year, Open Studios runs from 19 to 22 November. Then, come December, I hand back the keys to the castle, and see where I go from there. 

Avril Corroon is an artist based between Dublin and London. 

avrilcorroon.com

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CHRISTINE MACKEY REPORTS ON HER DURATIONAL RESIDENCY AS PART OF AN EU-FUNDED PROJECT.

WaterLANDS (Water-based Solutions for Carbon Storage, People and Wilderness) is an ambitious EU Horizon Europe Green Deal project, with 32 partners from 14 countries, coordinated by University College Dublin (waterlands.eu). Spanning from December 2021 to November 2026, with a budget of €23.6 million, the project’s environmental scope is the active restoration of wetland sites across Europe, generating carbon storage, supporting biodiversity, and creating lasting opportunities for local communities. 

WaterLANDS has also embedded artistic practice within a dedicated Artist Residency Programme, recognising restoration as a cultural and social endeavour, as well as an environmental one. Catríona Devery, research manager at the UCD Earth Institute, is the residency coordinator for the AIR programme. The artists were selected through a highly competitive open call that included a written application, a shortlisting stage, and a final interview.

Residency Sites

Rather than operating from a single fixed location, the WaterLANDS residency is deliberately mobile, placing artists directly within the landscapes they are engaging with. Six Artist Engagement Residencies were established across wetland Action Sites in Bulgaria, Estonia, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Each runs part-time over four years, with artists spending around four weeks per year embedded at their site, working alongside wetland scientists, conservationists, and local communities. This extended model allows for deep, evolving relationships between the artists and their landscapes.

The six selected artists bring a diverse range of practices to their respective sites: Maria Nalbantova at Dragoman Marsh, Bulgaria; Elo Liiv at the Pärnu Catchment, Estonia; Claudio Beorchia at the Venice Lagoon, Italy; Marjolijn Dijkman at the Ems-Dollard Estuary, The Netherlands; and Feral Practice (the creative identity of UK-based artist and researcher, Fiona MacDonald) and Laura Harrington across the Great North Bog, United Kingdom.

In Ireland, I was based at the Cuilcagh-Anierin Uplands SAC across Counties Leitrim and Cavan, a cluster of sites with strikingly different characters. Bencroy is a transitional habitat shifting from grassland to bog, featuring a disused coal mine that anchors the site’s geological history. Altateskin and Altachullion Upper are lowland blanket bogs, shaped by artificial drainage and conifer plantations, now actively managed and cleared. The most remote site, Sliabh an Iarainn (the ‘Iron Mountain’), east of Lough Allen, is defined by severe erosion and complex water systems.

Accessibility itself became a central discovery for this residency. Each site is a container of distinct physical conditions, unique rock formations, dense heather, and unstable ground, demanding a different quality of attention. The constant rain, sloping terrain, and risk of sinking knee-deep into exposed peat pools shape not only the landscape, but the way one moves through it, listens, and observes.

Over time, my focus deepened around Bencroy, which is currently undergoing active restoration after years of damage from hydrological erosion and climate change. It presents a striking example of bare peat. These are areas where protective vegetation has been lost, exposing the underlying soil to wind, ice, and water. Bare peat acts as a source of CO₂ emissions and signals serious habitat loss, making its restoration both ecologically and creatively urgent.

Residency Fieldwork & Outcomes

My creative direction grew from sustained fieldwork alongside botanists John Conaghan and Heather Bothwell, who carry out annual plant surveys on site. Walking the bogs with notebook and pencil in hand, I learned to read the landscape through their eyes, tracking which plant communities are there, and which might return as restoration takes hold. This collaboration with scientists has been central to the project, deepening my understanding of how to inhabit and interpret these landscapes through movement, listening, and close observation.

This WaterLANDS residency is not a commission in a conventional sense but an opportunity for long-term, seasonal research, one that resists the results-driven frameworks of many institutional contexts. The reading material alone, spanning ecological theory, land ownership politics, and restoration law, feeds directly into the visual and conceptual fabric of the work. It is a practice that is difficult to quantify, but unmistakably accumulative.

So far, the six artists have presented their work to the WaterLANDS General Assembly, hosted by the University of Leeds (12–15 May 2025), but this year we also staged our first group exhibition, held at Pärnu City Gallery Artists House in southwestern Estonia. Curated by Elo Liiv, this exhibition was an offshoot of the residency and was funded by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia. 

The WaterLANDS residency programme culminates this November in Venice, where the artists will collaborate with curators on a public event and accompanying publication. This will be a collective reflection on four years of work, made in and through wetland restoration, offering audiences a first encounter with the range of artistic responses emerging across all six sites. 

Dr Christine Mackey is an independent, research-based artist who lives in Manorhamilton, County Leitrim.

studiochristinemackey.com

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LYNDA LAIRD REPORTS ON HER RESIDENCY AT THE FORMER HOME OF ARTIST, WRITER, AND ACTIVIST, DEREK JARMAN.  

The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end. A time that does not cleave the day with rush hours, lunch breaks, the last bus home. As you walk in the garden you pass into this time – the moment of entering can never be remembered. Around you the landscape lies transfigured. Here is the Amen beyond the prayer. – Derek Jarman, Modern Nature (Century, 1991).

I first became interested in Dungeness, a headland on the Kent coast, while researching the Sussex Emerald moth, a rare and endangered species that inhabits the shingle landscape around the decommissioned nuclear power station. Conservationists have attempted to recreate its habitat elsewhere in England to support its declining population, but without success. I was drawn to the paradox of this fragile species surviving within a landscape often described as barren or hostile, its life entangled with the post-industrial and nuclear architecture of the coast.

Although the research had not yet developed into a finished body of work, Dungeness had already become a place I returned to imaginatively. I discovered the Prospect Cottage residency programme by chance while staying in London for a photography commission. My Airbnb host mentioned she was applying for a writing residency at the cottage, and I immediately looked up the opportunity myself. The residency felt like a convergence of interests I was already pursuing.

The residency programme at Prospect Cottage was established following the campaign to save Derek Jarman’s cottage after it was put up for sale in 2020. Managed by Creative Folkestone, it invites artists to live and work in the cottage, preserving Jarman’s legacy through direct engagement with the landscape and creative environment that shaped the latter years of his practice, before his death from AIDS-related complications in February 1994. The residency is funded, offered through open calls, and open to international applicants, including artists based in Ireland.

I arrived on a Saturday morning in February and was met by the cottage’s custodian, who handed me the key and showed me around. At the kitchen table, he showed me a copy of Derek Jarman’s Garden (Thames & Hudson, 1995), illustrated with Howard Sooley’s photographs. Shortly afterwards, there was a knock at the door. A visitor was standing outside. When the door opened, he introduced himself: “I’m Howard Sooley”. I could hardly believe the serendipity of the moment. It felt like an introduction, not only to the cottage but also to the network of relationships, friendships and chance encounters that orbit Jarman’s legacy.

In those first days, everything felt intensified by proximity: the garden, the shingle, the wind, the slow pressure of the sea, and the power station looming at the edge of the horizon. Prospect Cottage exists outside ordinary time. The rhythms of the garden and the vastness of the landscape invite a different kind of attention.

One of the most liberating aspects of the residency was that there was no prescribed outcome. I spent much of my time working experimentally and playfully. I made emulsions from gorse flowers to create anthotypes, built pinhole cameras from plant pots found in the garden, and developed photographic developers using materials gathered there, including santolina, lichen, rosemary, and valerian.

I made a series of still lifes in Derek Jarman’s study, composed of hag stones collected by Jarman and kept in a box in the cottage, alongside seed heads gathered from the garden. The work extended my ongoing interest in plant-based photographic processes and in the material relationship between landscape and image-making. By making photographic chemistry directly from plants in Jarman’s garden, the work became a form of collaboration with the site itself.

During my time at Prospect Cottage, I repeatedly returned to Modern Nature. I have since read the book several times, and it remains a deep source of reassurance. Jarman’s reflections on gardening, loss and creativity offer a way of thinking about resilience and the possibilities of making work through sustained attention and care.

The residency also extended beyond my stay at the cottage. I continued to visit Dungeness over the following year, pursuing my research into the Sussex Emerald moth. I photographed the wild carrot on which the species depends and joined a local lepidopterist on moth-trapping sessions, where I was fortunate enough to see one of these rare moths. These experiences developed into an ongoing relationship with the landscape and continue to inform my practice.

The residency initiated a body of work that I continue to develop. One image made during my time at Prospect Cottage was selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2025. Since then, I have continued working with the material gathered there, developing negatives in plant-based developers made from species from Jarman’s garden. I have also undertaken further research at Tate Britain, spending time with Derek Jarman’s journals, notebooks and films in the archive – research that is informing plans for a stop-frame animation, using the photographs and objects collected during and after the residency. 

Lynda Laird is a photographic artist, picture editor, and lecturer based in St Leonards on Sea.

lyndalaird.com

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JOANNA HOPKINS DISCUSSES HER ART PRACTICE AND A RECENT COMMUNITY ECOLOGY PROJECT AT NEPHIN NATIONAL PARK. 

I hold a BA in Fine Art Painting (2007) and an MA in Social Practice and the Creative Environment (2011) from Limerick School of Art and Design. As part of an Erasmus Exchange programme, I spent time at an art school in France, where the curriculum wasn’t separated by disciplines. Realising I could use new methods and processes encouraged me to work with multiple mediums. 

Residencies and small commissions help to support and develop my practice. In 2014, I was part of FIND, a public art project funded by Mayo Arts Office. I created a film work in an old silent cinema, commissioning a musician to create an original piano piece, with mentorship by Aideen Barry and Alice Maher. I was also mentored by Marie Brett – as part of a Residency in a care home in 2017, funded by Age & Opportunity – and by John Conway, for an Artist in the Community R&D award, funded by Create in 2022. Through funding from an Arts Council Bursary Award in 2023, Dr Eileen Hutton mentored me in ecological art approaches. I am inspired by these contemporary Irish artists whose practices are rooted in multiple mediums, with vibrant approaches to care, ecology, collaboration and experimentation. I combine my studio practice with collaborations and participatory projects by growing and making art with plants, such as The Studio at Beaufort House (2023–26) and the Soil Project (2024). 

Around 2016, my digital and neuroscience interests began to intersect with plant inspired research. I explored paper making with grass across two commissions and collaborated with Mary Conroy on An Urgent Enquiry (2019). As artist-in-residence at Dublin City University in 2020, I researched native plant folklore and their medicinal qualities. Because of pandemic restrictions, I started to feature myself in my work for the first time. For my solo exhibition, ‘Sympathetic Soup’ at DCU in 2021, I made pink ceramic cabbage leaves, tracked my menstrual diary with self-portraits of blood-related flowers, and documented the collecting of seven native wildflowers on the full moon. 

For my solo exhibition ‘Fruity Bodies’ at GOMA Waterford in 2023, I delved further into the folklore of plants, experimenting with plant-based inks, dyes and anthotypes. These processes are slow and seasonal. I hung a hawthorn tree in the gallery, and draped hawthorn trees with blackberry dyed wool and fabrics, to correlate seasons and the natural world with female bodily experience of cycles, decay and re-growth. 

In 2025, I was invited to participate in Wilderland, a public art and community ecology project in Mayo connecting people to their local environment through engagement, embedded research, and site-responsive art in the landscape. I researched and gathered plants by walking through Nephin National Park. Dye colours were extracted in my studio and during two participatory workshops, using a method of dying with lichens, passed on from local woman, Kay Goonan. 

Ring forts are rooted in folklore. I’m interested in their shifting uses over time, including how these circular cairns now share space with farms and conservation areas. Lios na Gaoithe (The Windy Fort) is a well-preserved ring fort in Nephin, which has undergone multiple uses as a burial ground and as a dwelling place. It sits gently in the park, a soft space in a gap of planted non-native conifers, holding a quiet energy, with a single hawthorn rooted at its entrance. 

On the morning of the winter solstice, I filmed at Lios na Goithe, a slow sequence of movements designed by Colm Hynes Yoga, inspired by trees and sheela na gig deities. Three bodies move through the space, then remain rooted in place, wearing handmade masks and plant-dyed, embroidered leaf motifs, layered to represent a vulva. They are dyed with lichens, hawthorn, oak, buddleia and invasive rhododendron, all gathered in the National Park. This film work was scored by musicians Irish Lights and will form part of my forthcoming solo show ‘Palimpsest’ at SUIL Gallery, County Clare, in February 2027. 

Joanna Hopkins is a visual artist working in video, drawing, photography and installation. 

joannahopkins.com

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Sinead Mc Cormick DISCUSSES THE EVOLUTION OF THE BAVA PROGRAMME ON SHERKIN ISLAND.

Over the past 25 years, the BA in Visual Arts (BAVA) programme on Sherkin Island has become known for its unique, evolving model of art education. The community-based, four-year, honours degree programme is fully accredited, managed, and delivered by the School of Art and Design at TU Dublin in partnership with Sherkin Island Development Society (SIDS), and Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre. It is part-funded by the Department of Rural and Community Development and Cork County Council. The programme provides an artist-centred, place-responsive education that embraces uncertainty, independence, and lived experience.

Far away from the infrastructures typically associated with art schools, BAVA Sherkin does not really have a specific purpose-built studio, or fixed workshop facilities, and no clear boundary between campus and community. Instead, Sherkin itself becomes both the place and the subject that shapes how students work, and also how they will come to understand what it means to be an artist in the real world. This is a course created in the real world for those who want to leave as fully-fledged, working artists, and is most likely the reason why BAVA graduates have won some major awards over the past number of years. 

Spanning just five kilometres, Sherkin’s scale has never been a limitation; instead, the land itself and the islanders who inhabit it become the focal point of the course in so many more ways than could even be imagined. For BAVA, Sherkin is not a backdrop; it is a collaborator with students developing work in kitchens, sheds, fields, and along the shoreline. Student exhibitions have emerged over the years in response to the landscape with installations in domestic spaces, on beaches, or within working environments. The relationship between art and place has always encouraged students to work both practically and conceptually with material choices shaped by availability. Ideas and concepts are tested by and against weather, terrain, and time.

While much has been written over the years about the programme, what isn’t always captured is how the students themselves become so embedded in the island that many of them choose to make Sherkin their permanent home after graduation, earning it the title as the Island of the Arts. BAVA students become part of the wider Sherkin community and there is an understanding that if aid is needed for anyone, it is given. This resonates with how people reminisce about the old days of villages and what community was once built upon. 

Because of this, students are not only learning techniques; they are learning how to situate their practice within real conditions, while solving real world problems along the way. Being on an island demands adaptability and forces students to foster artistic resilience that extends far beyond graduation and benefits them in their lives as working artists, says artist and course facilitator, Majella O’Neill Collins.

At the core of BAVA is a model that is entirely different from conventional art education courses. Alongside the curriculum, the programme emphasises mentorship, peer learning, and self-directed practice. Speaking of the course, lecturer Sinead Mc Cormick says: “Tutors are themselves practising artists, actively engaged in exhibition-making and research. This creates a learning environment grounded in lived experience rather than abstraction. The relationship between student and tutor is closer to apprenticeship than instruction, with knowledge shared through dialogue, critique, and example.”

Due to smaller class sizes, peer critique is central to the course. Students are encouraged to articulate their ideas, challenge one another, and develop critical frameworks together. The absence of a large institution is what pushes students to be extra accountable and to engage in more tangible ways with their peers, tutors and the islanders, who they come to rely on during the course of their four-year degree programme. BAVA is a model of how art education is imagined for the future, yet it has been happening on Sherkin for decades.  

One of the most unique aspects of BAVA is its integration within the island community. Sherkin is not simply a location for the programme; it is a participant and so too are the people who live there year-round. While students draw from the community, they also contribute to it, bringing new perspectives and creative energy to the island. This has helped to establish Sherkin as a site of ongoing artistic activity, with an international reputation that belies its small size. The result is a model of art education that is not isolated from the world but deeply embedded within it.

As BAVA moves into its next phase, its significance lies not only in its longevity, but in what it suggests about the future of art education in Ireland. Over the course of the programme, participating students have come from Sherkin and other West Cork islands; elsewhere in Ireland, including Dublin; Ukraine, Poland, Germany, and the UK. A number of graduates of the programme now live permanently on Sherkin Island. At a time when rental costs are rising and accommodation is a constant struggle, Sherkin offers an alternative: a decentralised, community integrated model that prioritises sustainability and community living, both artistic and social. Students rent accommodation on Sherkin for the weekend blocks, staying in shared houses and the island hostel. The programme’s evolution reflects a shift towards recognising the value of diverse educational ecologies that are responsive to place, grounded in practice, and open to experimentation. 

The MA Art and Environment (MAAE) is a TU Dublin School of Art and Design master’s programme that combines post-studio art practice, interdisciplinary research, virtual teaching, island studies and community engagement. It is located in the West Cork archipelago and Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre. Like the BAVA programme, this archipelagic master’s is a significant arts and cultural resource for the region and has extended the range of creative opportunities not only for islanders, but for the broader West Cork community. With its focus on environmental art practice and community art-related knowledge, the students, led by Programme Chair, Dr Glenn Loughran, are actively involved in contemporary culture as organisers, makers, and commentators.

Recruitment for the 2026 intake signals not just the continuation of BAVA, but the renewal of how art education is perceived and received internationally. It is a course that understands learning as something that happens not only in studios or lecture halls, but in landscapes, in communities, and in the spaces in between. On Sherkin Island, art education is not removed from life. It is inseparable from it. 

Sinead Mc Cormick is an artist based on Sherkin Island. She is a graduate of BAVA and MAAE and is now lecturing on the BAVA programme.

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RACHAEL GILBOURNE INTERVIEWS ALBERTA WHITTLE ABOUT HER TWO-PERSON EXHIBITION WITH CAMILLE SOUTER CURRENTLY SHOWING AT IMMA.

Rachael Gilbourne: When we first met in 2019, we spoke about our shared experiences of caregiving, and the difference between empathy and compassion. Your work carries this too – a deep sense of healing and hope in a brutal world. How do you speak about trauma and violence through your practice without it sinking into despair?

Alberta Whittle: Thinking of that time reminds me how lonesome being an artist can be, but also how global crises can bring people together in affinity and hope. My heart was sore then, and I was trying to figure out my voice. I was disturbed by the grief and rage of that socio-political landscape, which in hindsight, seems much calmer than today. I am the child of two trade unionists, and I’ve learned that community is what stops me from sinking into despair. Community can come from kith and kin, or from the chosen family I am lucky to work with. Isolation can narrow one’s thinking, and we need people to remind us of what is at stake when we lose touch with our individual softness. Togetherness keeps us intentional. 

RG: You’ve previously mentioned that you think of yourself as a self-taught artist. How do you reconcile academic achievement with your authentic, organic, and intuitive approaches to making? 

AW: Whilst I think art education is an indispensable place of thinking and community-building, I am a reluctant student. Academia and education in the UK, Europe, and North America is incredibly colonial, and insists on following conservative parameters of judgement and curricula that ignore and obfuscate the global majority’s experience. The systems of education I participated in rarely fit my needs. Coming from a family of excellent teachers and artists, I am aware of their tremendous role as pastoral caregivers, questioners, and educators. However, we still need to change the system itself. I look forward to reimagining arts education as a lecturer or teacher myself someday. For me, education has always been a foundational instructive space, but the important work can happen outside of these environments. 

RG: How representative is the selection of your works within ‘Fisherwoman, Fisherwoman’, your two-person exhibition at IMMA with Camille Souter (1929–2023)?

AW: I am always curious about what will unfold when working with a new curator and institution. I’m genuinely delighted with how you have brought works into conversation with one another for the first time. For instance, it’s exciting that the RESET installation sits alongside key watercolour suites. I think the exhibition gives a good flavour of my practice, while also speaking to Camille’s work. This is very much a two-person show, and it’s been intriguing to see how the pairings of our works complement and ask different questions. It speaks very clearly on our shared concerns of environmental catastrophe, whilst also thinking about grief, family, and other healing practices. 

RG: The works of key thinkers and philosophers have been significant in the development of your practice. Can you share some of those research influences with us? 

AW: Studying for my PhD was indispensable in encouraging me to balance my making practice with researching thinkers and philosophers like Edwidge Danticat, Kamau Brathwaite, Christina Sharpe, bell hooks, Maud Sulter, and Saidiya Hartman. Crucially, this taught me that the humanities are indispensable for imagining different futures and opened my eyes to my responsibility as an artist. For instance, reading Maya Goodfellow’s Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats (Verso Books, 2019), was important in understanding the fundamental structures of racism and anti-blackness that have continued to stoke the fires of British imperialism and fracture the safety of global majority folk. I see the traces of this book in my Autumn Equinox paintings and in the wateriness of my coil sculptures. 

RG: Your beaded works, referred to as ‘coils’, are woven hanging sculptures with cowrie shells, pearls, bells and other materials, streaming vertically from ceiling beams to the handcrafted frames of your paintings. In ‘Fisherwoman, Fisherwoman’, you’ve created your longest coil sculpture to date, at over 11 metres. Can you speak about coils as a recurring form in your practice? 

AW: I first began making coils as a response to the collective reading of Audre Lorde’s 1978 essay, ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’. I was part of a wonderful interdisciplinary group exhibition, ‘Sex Ecologies’ at Kunsthall Trondheim curated by Stefanie Hessler in 2022, and by reading Lorde, I found myself gravitating to the power of pleasure and inter-species love. It still feels like a massive change in direction to remember how this manifested. The coil is a way for me to think about intergenerational connections, but also interspecies relations. It is a naval string; a line from the land to the bottom of the ocean. It is a transmitter of intertidal knowledge as well as memory work. When I string the beads, I count them and order them in particular permutations linked to prime numbers. Threading these beads into a coil becomes an act of meditation and a way to remember. 

RG: This is the first time your work has been shown in Ireland. What has become apparent for you, in thinking about audiences here?

AW: Whenever I am invited to show my work in new contexts, I always try to imagine what existing conversations I am entering into, but also what knowledge might be missing for my audiences. I don’t take my audiences’ knowledge or instincts for granted and try to give them clues into my thinking. This is the first time I have been able to work with a curator to develop such a full-some timeline of my work. Some of these details are intensely personal, such as my parents’ reasoning to return to the Caribbean to raise their children family. Other details reveal the historical, social, and cultural issues I am drawn to in my work. I wonder whether audiences here will be interested in the interlinking colonial histories between the Caribbean and Ireland.

RG: Can you share your experience of working on ‘Fisherwoman, Fisherwoman’? 

AW: It has been an honour to get to know Camille’s two children, Tim and Natasha, who have shared time and personal stories with me. In particular, it was so special to visit her studio in Achill with you and Natasha, and to toast her with a wee whiskey. Since returning to my studio in Glasgow, I’ve kept thinking of Camille and her vigorous practice, pushing me on as part of a new generation. But one of the most special times, in preparation for this show, was working with Camille’s son, Tim Morris (and his assistant Gem) in his foundry, on Summoning Spirit – Experiments in Alchemy. There was something so magical about the process. We talked about so many things, from Benin bronzes to memories of Camille, to love and grief – it’s all present in those bronze sculptures. This making process became a bit of a rebirth for my practice, to try something completely different, while emphasising the presence of love, friendship, and labour in this collaborative work. I am forever changed. Thank you. 

Alberta Whittle is a Barbadian-Scottish multidisciplinary artist based in Glasgow.

albertawhittlestudio.com

Rachael Gilbourne is the curator of ‘Fisherwoman, Fisherwoman’ and Assistant Curator: Exhibitions – Projects & Partnerships at IMMA, where ‘Fisherwoman, Fisherwoman’ continues until 13 September.

imma.ie

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SÉAMUS MCCORMACK DISCUSSES THE UK-BASED ORGANISATION SUPPORTING EMERGING AND EARLY-CAREER ARTISTS FOR OVER SEVEN DECADES. 

At New Contemporaries, we believe that creating environments where artists feel supported from their first point of contact with the art world is essential to building a more diverse, inclusive and sustainable system. Founded in 1949, by and for artists, we continue that sprit today to be led by our values that artists change us, and that everything can be reinvented. 

Over the decades, our programme has included artists such as Ed Atkins, Monster Chetwynd, Phil Collins, Tacita Dean, Antony Gormley, Sophie von Hellermann, Mona Hatoum, David Hockney, John Hoyland, Isaac Julien, Anish Kapoor, Mark Leckey, Rachel Maclean, Haroon Mirza, Richard Mosse, Mike Nelson, Laure Prouvost, Paula Rego and Gillian Wearing, among many others. What connects these artists is not a shared style, but the moment at which they were supported, at a formative point before wider recognition.

During the 1970s and 1980s, our annual exhibition operated as an artist-led initiative, organised and selected by students and artists themselves. In 1988, we re-established as an independent organisation and registered charity, creating a more sustainable structure while retaining a commitment to artist-led selection, strengthening our role between art education, professional practice, and public institutions. We are a small core team of five staff, with a Board of Trustees, and are funded by Arts Council England as a National Portfolio Organisation. 

While formats and contexts continue to evolve, our purpose remains the same: to support artists at the point where new work, new thinking and new practices emerge. We co-curate an exhibition and public programme with leading London-based institutions including South London Gallery, ICA, and Camden Arts Centre, and nationally including most recently at Grundy Art Gallery (Blackpool), KARST (Plymouth), Humber Street Gallery (Hull), and upcoming at MIMA (Middlesborough) and Focal Point Gallery (Southend). By partnering with each of these institutions, we want to celebrate the particular art ecosystems in that locality. We build programmes to extend from the exhibition with artist-run spaces or other activities in each region. 

Artists are selected for participation through an annual open call, which is selected by a panel that includes our team and established artists. For 2026, this panel includes Joy Gregory, Florence Peake, and Abbas Zahedi, who represent an exciting cross section of contemporary practice. To apply, artists need to be based in the UK, be over 21 (with no upper age limit), and we actively encourage applications from artists who are underrepresented in the sector, including those who experience barriers linked to ethnicity, class, disability, gender and sexuality. 

Over the last few years, we have expanded our eligibility remit, which now is self-defined by artists wanting to participate in our programme as ‘emerging or early-career’ and have removed the need to have graduated from formal art education. This is in recognition of the variety of trajectories for artists to start or even maintain a practice. We have seen an increased growth in pathways for artists, including informal, non-accredited learning programmes such as Open School East, Syllabus, and the Turps Studio Programme, as well as artists returning to practice later in life. In response to this expanding and increasingly diverse landscape, we are keen to support artists who are developing their practice outside of traditional routes of education. 

Our work takes place across a year-round programme of artist development. This programme is shaped by the approaches, needs and ambitions of artists working today, and includes mentoring, workshops, talks, residencies, and commissions. Currently, we work with organisations such as FORMA and Hospitalfield to create opportunities for studio residencies, and this is something we are keen to grow, as access to studio provision becomes increasing challenging for artists. 

Our remit is to support artists across the four nations of the UK, and we are actively working to create stronger relationships and visibility for artists working in all areas of the country. We have recently received a curatorial grant from Art Fund to undertake some research with practitioners and organisations in both Belfast and Derry/Londonderry, as a way of understanding the needs of artists in the Northern Irish context. 

The UK, particularly the city hubs, still attract many Irish or Ireland-based artists to either study or practice. Over the last number of years, we have worked with artists from the island including Christopher Steenson and Aaron Alexander Smyth (2025); Síomha Harrington and Hazel O’Sullivan (2024); Alannah Cyan and Anne McCloy (2023); Aoibheann Greenan (2021); and Cáit and Éiméar McClay (2020). We have seen their individual practices benefit from inclusion, leading to more opportunities, visibility, and connecting with new networks. 

Artists can participate in our programme in two ways: either by applying through our annual open-call programme, which opens in the spring of each year; or through attending our online or in-person events, advertised on our website or social media channels, that address topics and issues to support the next generation of artists. What excites me about working at New Contemporaries is the variety of artists we get to collaborate with, along with the range of UK-based partners we programme with. Our programme is agile, adaptive, and able to create meaningful change by responding to artists’ needs, while remaining new and forward-looking.

Séamus McCormack is an Irish born London based curator and Senior Curator at New Contemporaries.

newcontemporaries.org.uk

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