RICHARD MALONE REPORTS ON THEIR RESIDENCY EXPERIENCE IN THE BRITISH SCHOOL AT ROME.

The Derek Hill Foundation Scholarship is a residency in the British School at Rome – one of a number of historical research institutes offering residencies around the city. The BSR application opens annually in late November and is open to Ireland and UK-based artists. The scholarship is for painting and drawing, but this can be broad, experimental, and far reaching. Applicants are shortlisted and the final selection is made by a panel of museum directors, curators, and the foundation. The residency award comes with a monthly stipend, a large studio, three meals a day (and afternoon tea), 24-hour library access, and access to libraries and archives in Rome and around Italy.

I was surprised (and excited) to win the scholarship, as I had understood such institutions to be quite formal in how they commission and categorise research, and conservative in their approach to art, often grounded in classical frameworks that, in turn, are heavily intwined with colonial and patriarchal ideals, with Rome historically being the epicentre of these structures. My research is centred on the invisible – markers of gender, class, and queerness, which share commonalities in often being marginalised and overlooked. I’m interested in how we participate in a hierarchy of material values – grounded in principles of patriarchy, patronage, and policing – of taste, class, material culture, the body, and so on. It is a rigid system that persists to this day through education, access, language, and what is deemed valuable. How do we create ideas of truth? How can we trust historical accuracy when women, queer people, and the working class continue to be silenced, censored, and erased? 

As well as the artists, there are numerous doctoral, post-doc, and research candidates on residency in BSR, mainly from prestigious universities. It is interesting how much time is spent referencing discoveries and texts written during the Victorian era by privileged white men on grand tours. One example in a museum was Etruscan burial vessels, containing ‘couples of note’. In one urn was two women, which the archaeologists deemed high priestesses or witches, as opposed to a couple, like everyone else. This speaks to Victorian morals imposing meaning based on a limited imagination and experience. When we have a homogenous demographic responsible for the discovery, interpretation, and classification of artefacts, we are left with dogmatic readings and understandings of history. 

In the BSR studio, I explored combinations of painted surfaces, creating quilts and stitched cloth to paint on, or found board and detritus drenched in oil paint. I painted on moving blankets, cast cloth with masonry paint, created installations out of samplers, applied pigment directly to the wall. Much of my works were made in conversation with one other. The work sat like questions, as if to challenge understandings of tasteful art or exclusive histories. I loosely painted patterns, including the striped or harlequin forms used to identify the heretic, the witch, the queer, the jester. I explored ideas and representations of the ‘other’ using forms that challenge the nature of a painted object or value systems applied to the painted surface.

The BSR residency is stimulating, direct, open, inquisitive, and genuine. The studio is fantastic, as are the other artists. It is a credit to the team to select such a diverse range of practices in just seven artists. We arranged studio visits with each other and prepared collectively for open studios. It felt like an art school from another time, in which space, thought, and work were prioritised. Debate was encouraged and not polarising. We worked hard, had drinks on the roof in the sun, took trips to the countryside, or visited sites we wanted to see. We stayed up together before open studios to make sure everyone got over the finish line in time, having ice cold limoncellos while stretching canvasses and prepping studio walls. I can’t recommend this residency enough as a space for creative and inquisitive practices. I urge everyone to apply and to discover Rome as a layered, political, and enriching city that is everchanging, yet never moving. The BSR residency has opened a dialogue and raised questions that will stay with me for a long time.

Richard Malone is an artist based between Wexford and London. 

richard-malone.com

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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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ESLAM ABD EL SALAM REFLECTS ON HIS RECENT RESIDENCY AT KUNSTVEREIN AUGHRIM.

Director of Kunstverein Aughrim, Kate Strain, got in touch with me last year, through the loveliest email, asking if I was interested in a studio visit, so that she could get to know my practice more. I was filled with excitement, as I find it rare these days that curators would genuinely reach out to artists to have a conversation. It was refreshing to say the least. 

Kate mentioned that she was thinking of developing an artist residency programme in Aughrim and asked whether I’d be interested in participating in the pilot programme in summer 2025. In my head, I was already there – in Aughrim and all around County Wicklow. I have only been to the Wicklow Mountains once, back in 2019, and was warned by my friend, Michael, that there was going to be an abundance of light and beauty. 

Can you see with your heart? This question sums up my time in Aughrim and is the title of a new body of photographic research, which combines with another ongoing photographic project of mine, called ‘Little Did I Know’. It felt natural and easy to imagine these two projects in communication, almost like a phone call, informing each other about the past and the present. 

In ‘Can You See With Your Heart?’ you will find me listening to past conversations that never left me, about the different ways I’m trying to stay in touch with my heart when it comes to seeing. A verse from the Quran became an anchor: “Have they not journeyed through the land, so their hearts may understand, and their ears may listen? Indeed, it is not the eyes that are blind, but it is the hearts within the chests that grow blind.” (22:46)

Personally, that verse has always stuck in my mind, for many reasons, and the more I age, the more it all makes sense. Eyes can be cloudy, judgemental at times, and confused. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the heart won’t fall for the same tropes, but when understood, guarded and gently protected, seeing can become moral and spiritual sustenance for the soul and body. Would you agree that this is our most precious gift?

How the heart sees will lead us to moving as a spiritual process. I have been on the move since last December, not by choice. Five homes, four months; the minute your body settles or tries to recognise the way from your bedroom to the kitchen and other surroundings, it’s time for you to leave. The discomfort, both physical and emotional; the quiet uncertainty that clouds over your days. Those movements – steps in all their metaphorical and literal sense – are a blessing. I saw light I wouldn’t have otherwise had the chance to encounter. The geographical distance at play with each house was so much fun; the way my body ached from carrying bags and holding, releasing breath. The ways in which I felt held by friends. Moving is required, and the flexibility that comes with it is invaluable, mostly to your heart. It’s a long braid and a dialogue that never ends. 

At the start of the residency, Kate mentioned that one of the things she connects with most in my photographs is the depiction of the human element as a body of nature. Sitting with her comment was like an opening for me to ask questions about the ‘nature’ that we develop and acquire with time as living, breathing, mobilised bodies.

In one of these photographs, we see an adult called Marc holding a toy horse. Horses, to me, are graceful, sensitive, and utterly divine creatures; every time I encounter one up close or from a distance, my heart just skips a beat. Marc embodies their nature of immense honesty and purity, strength and fragility that you want to hold and shield. When I saw the toy horse in his cottage, and he told me it was a gift from his mother at the age of nine, I smiled at how it all made sense.

To mark the end of my residency, my exhibition, ‘Can You See With Your Heart?’ launched at Kunstverein Aughrim on 27 June, presenting a series of photographs and objects (found, gifted and collected) in a state of mirroring one another. Small echoes of an inner shift; gentle reminders of things felt but rarely seen. 

Through the years, certain themes have never left me. They grow with me, and they reform and change as I get older. Home, foreign and familiar to us all, never ceases to reveal dimensions not previously perceived. Family dynamics. The variety of questions asked and raised about synchronicity, time, and fate. Grief and the colours and stages of it. The main pillar of my practice is walking – more specifically and recently, walking as an act of remembrance and how that relates to grief. 

Eslam Abd El Salam is an Egyptian visual artist based in Belfast. Through the mediums of analogue photography, polaroid, text, and mixed media, Eslam considers notions of synchronicity, specifically in relation to friendship and serendipitous encounters with others.

@eslamabdelsalam_

Eslam undertook a month-long residency at Kunstverein Aughrim in June as part of Aughrim’s Craic in the Granite Music & Arts Festival 2025, supported by Wicklow County Council Arts Office festival awards, funded through the Arts Council. 

kunstverein.ie

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LISA FINGLETON REFLECTS ON A MONTH-LONG RESIDENCY AT NAVDANYA BIODIVERSITY AND CONSERVATION FARM IN NORTHERN INDIA.

“We are all connected through food. We are all connected through soil. We are all connected through life. And those are the interconnections that we have to build consciously now.”¹  

For over 20 years, much of my life and art practice have been focused on food systems, and the increasingly radical acts of growing and eating local and organic food.

I regularly wonder how we have reached this point, where most of the food and seed in the world is controlled by a small number of global corporations. Why are we eating poisoned and ultra-processed food, even though we know it is damaging our guts and making us and our loved ones sick? Why are we, as an island, so dependent on imported food? How can we feed ourselves in increasingly precarious climactic conditions and protect biodiversity at the same time?

These questions propelled me to travel all the way from our farm in Kerry to Navdanya at the foothills of the Himalayas in India. Navdanya biodiversity and conservation farm was founded by Dr Vandana Shiva in 1987 (navdanya.org). Vandana is a prolific writer, internationally renowned food activist, and environmental thinker. She not only resists capitalist food systems at an international level, but she and her team grow 750 varieties of rice, fruit and vegetables in the living seed bank on the farm, as a way to protect and save indigenous seeds.

I travelled with my partner, photographer Rena Blake, to take part in a month-long agro-ecology residency at the Earth University in Navdanya, with 20 other diverse artists and activists from around the world. All the food for the month was vegetarian, organic and locally sourced. The programme started each day with herbal tea at 6:30am, breakfast, an opening circle and shramdaan (shared tasks in the communal area) before heading to the fields to do whatever jobs were needed: harvesting, seed saving or weeding. I was really glad to have a cold bucket shower after even a short stint of working outdoors in 35 degrees and high humidity. This was followed by lectures, practical workshops and opportunities to present our own projects until around 8:30pm each evening. It was brilliant and intense in equal measure.

I drew in journals every day as a way of processing the experience, both for myself and so that I could share it with others upon my return. I set up an outdoor studio for myself on the balcony outside our room overlooking the mango orchard. One of the absolute highlights of the trip was being in the stillness of the seedbank and drawing with the seed savers Sheela Godiyal and Kavita Negi. There was something deeply moving about being surrounded by seeds grown with such love and passion for this planet we call home.

Vandana was extremely generous with her time and energy, delivering lectures with lots of time for discussion afterwards. It was a real privilege to interview her about the interconnectedness between food, creativity and climate change for my short film, The Radical Art of Living (2025). She had strong cautionary messages for Ireland in terms of protecting small growers and food producers. “Just remembering the Irish famine, I would just say, if the current trends continue, every place will be a place for a potential famine.”

Dr Mira Shiva, Vandana’s sister, was with us for a few days, weaving stories from her lifelong experience as a medical doctor and activist. She talked about an international meeting, where a scientist was proposing to create square tomatoes to facilitate easier packaging. Those present, reminded him that everyone knew tomatoes were round, and therefore would know that this was not natural. He responded, “In one generation they will forget that tomatoes were round.” 

Mira cautioned us against this collective amnesia and shifting baseline, whereby each generation assumes that their degraded ecological environment is ‘normal’. ‘The Square Tomato’ formed in my mind as a symbol for so many things that are challenging within the current food system. I decided to use it as the title for my current exhibition at Siamsa Tíre in Tralee, which includes the film and drawings from Navdanya.

Before leaving, I asked Vandana how she sustained her energy, and she said “Living truth. Expressing truth is my oxygen.” It’s not always easy to digest hard truths but I left Navdanya with a renewed sense of urgency. People have asked me many times if it was a life changing trip, but I feel it was more life affirming. I didn’t get answers to all my questions but rather a validation for my concerns and a clearer call to action. As Vandana says in the last line of her book, The Nature of Nature, “With every seed we sow, every plant we grow, every morsel we eat, we make a choice between degeneration and regeneration.”² My choice is clear.

Lisa Fingleton is an artist, writer and organic grower based at The Barna Way, an organic farm, woodland and wildlife sanctuary in Kerry.

lisafingleton.com

Fingleton’s film, The Radical Art of Living: An Interview with Dr Vandana Shiva (2025), is being screened as part of her solo exhibition, ‘The Square Tomato’, which continues at Siamsa Tíre until 22 March.

siamsatire.com

¹ Vandana Shiva, The Nature of Nature: The Metabolic Disorder of Climate Change (New Delhi: Women Unlimited Ink, 2024).

² Ibid.

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MIRIAM O’CONNOR DISCUSSES HER RESEARCH ACTIVITIES AS PART OF VAI’S ‘EXPERIMENT!’ AWARD.

In early May, I was announced as recipient of Visual Artists Ireland’s Experiment! Award. Devised as part of their 40th anniversary programme, Experiment! is a pilot initiative that provides an alternative form of residency for artists, granting funding to the recipient for time to experiment, research, undertake training or project development. The programme is targeted towards artists who, due to work, family or other commitments, are unable to avail of traditional residency opportunities. Not so long ago, as VAI were developing this initiative, there was no way of knowing that a global pandemic was about to unfold, and that the need for remote residency models would soon come into sharp focus.

Earlier in the year, I had concluded a long-term body of photographic work, ‘Tomorrow is Sunday’, a project that engages with my return to the family farm, following a bereavement in 2013. At the time of writing, this work is being exhibited at Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, and a solo presentation will take place at the Ashford Gallery in the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, in Spring, 2021. Despite these key career accomplishments, producing the work had been highly challenging, often curtailed by everyday demands of working on a farm. I frequently felt like the time I could physically attribute to my art practice was compromised.

Unexpected developments, such as a recent farm inspection by the Department of Agriculture, compelled me to begin thinking about new ways in which farming and art practice might endure in a more harmonious fashion. A key directive arising from the Department of Agriculture’s inspection requested clearing back an area of marginal land on the farm, which was deemed incompatible with animal grazing. This scenario meant additional work, on top of an already demanding schedule. It was almost the straw that broke the camel’s back; yet it acted as an instrumental catalyst for this research. The Experiment! Award thus presented an ideal opportunity for me to test a hypothesis in my proposal, which aimed to position daily farm tasks as artistic endeavours and the farm itself, a site for artist residency. Through acts of farm labour, this research period would foster conditions in which new understandings and approaches to farm work might be activated. Engaging with some of the characteristics and nuances of inspections in a general sense, compulsory tasks would be approached through a different prism, but nonetheless, with a genuine sense of purpose that the job should be accomplished. With such fixations in mind, I was, it seemed, on course to become my own inspector of cattle, fences, fields, ditches and drains.

Over the last number of months, various inspections have been conducted which blurred the boundaries between functionality and absurdity. I began my attempts to reclaim marginal land by using a strimmer, hedge clippers and loppers as tools for art making. Although this arduous task continues, modest progress has been achieved. So far, I have revealed a large rock at risk of being devoured by furze bushes and discovered a riotous looking rose bush, which I intend to propagate by taking stem cuttings later in the year. The idea that this rose bush could take root in other parts of the farm, or in alternative places is particularly appealing. In another study, the purchase of a new lawnmower – a novel tool for mark-making – has unearthed eclectic possibilities. Throughout this research period, I have become interested in animal actions and consequences, and their capacity to work with me in a collaborative sense by using their subtle – and rather useful – interventions of grazing, digging and path-making. With this in mind, another experiment focused on a buttercup, which caught my attention one day in a field of grass about to be grazed. To prevent this flower from being eaten (who ate the art?), I constructed an artificial fence, to see if their relationship to fencing, in a general sense, would act as a deterrent. I spent a number of days inspecting their behaviour – often making unannounced visits to their field. Eventually, they broke through this placebo fencing system, as one afternoon, on a surprise inspection, the flower had gone. This whole process provoked me to reflect on the rotational sensibilities between grass growth and grazing and the idea that this routine activity might be considered as both performative and ephemeral land art.

The tradition and approaches of land art, the vocabulary of agricultural inspections, and having that sense of purpose, remain central themes in this ongoing research. I’m still rather curious about how photography might assume agency of its own, beyond documentary approaches. If the intention is to tease out common ground between farming and art practice, then, what can photography do? Adopting an inspectoral eye in approaching everyday tasks is a one thing. But what should inspectors point their camera at? Is there a visual language best suited to this role? Are there tried and tested ways to distract an inspector who is just trying to get the job done. And so, this research continues…

Over the last number of months, VAI’s Experiment! Award has functioned to support this research period and naturally there are many stones still left unturned. By its nature, the concept of experimenting is as much about trial and error, as it is about yielding definitive results. Although conceived in pre-COVID-19 times, this timely initiative communicates that VAI are on the pulse in recognising the challenges faced by many artists in accessing ‘off-site’ residency opportunities. Correspondingly, the programme questions preconceived ideas of what a residency can be, making way for something more fluid to be imagined. While the vexing conundrum of what to do while on residency might still persist, what we become as artists, or what happens to us while on residency, remains on my mind. Is it possible to replicate those feelings and responses in a setting that is already overfamiliar?

In recent weeks, I have been invited to take part in the Cow House Studios’ ‘Supported Summer Residency’ programme, an initiative which, in the normal run of events, would see me spend a week, along with a number of other artists, at their studios in County Wexford. Rather than turn down this invitation, due to my individual circumstances, I asked Co-Directors, Frank Abruzzese and Rosie O’Gorman, if my residency could be approached in other ways. After some considered exchanges, Frank and Rosie have generously agreed for my residency to take place remotely (inspector in residence!) and that they will visit me on the farm in County Cork in early August. Although still fine-tuning plans for this event, I am currently taking inspiration from Nancy Holt’s, Stone Ruin Tours, a performative artwork where small groups of people were taken on a tour of a crumbling garden with stone walls (see holtsmithsonfoundation.org). Presently, it is anticipated that Frank and Rosie’s visit will too adopt an inspectoral role. We hope for good weather, robust conversations and exchanges, while welcoming all and any chance encounters or collaborations that might emerge. Following on from their tour, refreshments will be served afterwards against the backdrop of that newly salvaged rock, located on the marginal piece of land deemed unfit for animal grazing.

Miriam O’ Connor is an artist, educator and farmer based in Cork.
miriamoconnor.com

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