Wednesday 16 January 2019

SHIFT Residency

Last week I started a residency in SHIFT–an exciting new space in central Cardiff.

SHIFT is not long established and is run by Jon Ruddick and Pria Borg-Marks as a workspace for artists to make and test out large scale art. The space is in an old empty shop below the Capitol Shopping centre in Cardiff. I recall the place as a seasonal shop selling Halloween and Christmas stuff many years ago, but it's been vacant for a long time now. It is absolutely massive and an excellent location for new large scale artwork.

I have a few projects that I need to work on during my time in SHIFT. In Spring I will be taking part in SWAP Editions, where I will be creating a new & exclusive piece in my Digital Border series. I’m looking forward to relearning my processes for producing those pieces. I think I can probably work out how to make the landscapes and snapshots from memory and last year’s studio notes. Fingers crossed. My other project is one I have been meaning to investigate for some time.

I’m interested in what it means to be a contemporary Irish landscape painter in this post-internet age. I’m thinking about looking at the written descriptive elements of the Tory Island Painters and how that might feed into the addition of text to images shared on social media. I’ve spent some time wrestling with these two disparate elements and thinking about how they might be combined through my own work. I’ve written a bit already about the Tory Island school, and how they’ve influenced me. I think they represent an independent art school–and one that is uniquely Irish.


Hopefully, I’ll be able to make the most of my time in SHIFT to not only produce some exciting new work but to also develop these two projects in ways that I would not have been able to otherwise. Watch this space for more info when I get a chance to write it up.

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