Artlink is delighted to introduce the three artists selected to be part of the artist-in-residence programme 2023. A large number of high quality applications were received many of them responding to the unique characteristics of Fort Dunree. The selection panel comprised Esther Alleyne from Roe Valley Arts & Cultural Centre; Jeremy Howard from the Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny; Catherine Hemelryck from the Centre for Contemporary Art, Derry-Londonderry; Martha McCulloch, Artlink and Adriana Valderrama Lopez, PHD Researcher at School of Arts & Humanities, Ulster University. One Irish artist and two international artists were selected to take part in the programme.
International Atlantic Exchange Artist Residency: Tessa Graham
Tessa Graham is a visual artist, writer and educator living in St. John’s, Newfoundland. As an art teacher she has worked and lived across the province from Labrador City to St. John’s, allowing the land in all its seasonal iterations to influence her practice. She has participated in group shows throughout Newfoundland as well as a solo show in Ontario. Tessa’s most recent work has been publicly funded by ArtsNL which culminated in a solo show in March 2023. Tessa began an MFA at Memorial University, Grenfell Campus in May 2023. She is a current member of Eastern Edge Artist-Run Centre, VANL-CARFAC and an active member of the arts community in St. John’s.
“I place great importance on process in my artistic practice, working primarily with film photography and printmaking. I focus on liminal relationships between personal identity, geographical routines and the natural world. Recently I have begun to explore the notion of displacement and the embodiment of home through the process of documenting seasonal foraging in Newfoundland. I record and respond to the physical places I inhabit, allowing myself to be inspired by the imagery, shapes and colours that create a specific region. My work emphasizes place, and the role it plays in tandem with searching for and longing to find home.”
“During my residency, I will engage in dialogue with the community and document the process of cultivating culture through community connections: baking bread, planting seeds, local foraging etc. Slow, intentional living. Gathering source material for future projects, I will document my experience through film photography and use digital reference images for future screen prints. This would include colour sampling the landscape and surrounding habitation.”
Image by Sarah Kierstead
International Artist Residency: Karolina Bregula
Karolina Breguła is a visual artist, a graduate of the National Film School in Łódź. She creates films, photographs, installations and performance. Her work explores the problems of the status of the artwork and the materiality of art objects. She critically scrutinises contemporary art and its reception.
She creates stories about art and architecture, which are a field of her anthropological and sociological observations. She is interested in the connection between art and reality – the favourable and detrimental effect of artists’ work, the remedial and destructive force of artistic activity, rituals connected to art and art’s social role. Many of her works are co-created with their protagonists and participants, blurring the border lines between professional and amateur artistic activity.
Her works have been exhibited at institutions such as National Museum in Warsaw, Jewish Museum in New York and MOCA Taipei and at international events such as Venice Art Biennale and Singapore Biennale. Her works are included in collections such as Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Wroclaw Contemporary Museum and ING Polish Art Foundation. She is an associate professor at Academy of Art in Szczecin and she collaborates with lokal_30 Gallery. She lives in Warsaw.
During her residency Karolina Bregula plans to make a documentary film in a style of a fairy tale, together with the local community. She wants to tell the imagined stories of their neighbourhoods based on the prognosis of the climate analysts, in particular in relation to rising sea levels.
Image by Matan Radin
Irish Artist Residency: Caoimhín Gaffney
“My work in still and moving-image uses inward-looking meditations with surreal scenes and images to envision alternative ways of being and worlds with their own logic and possibilities. The texts and scripts I write are often without traditional narratives or character arcs, aiming to create an unsettled terrain that reflects the unsettled and uncomfortable emotions and sensations they discuss. Often the characters’ roles – or way of performing – change from scene to scene, creating an ambiguity that reflects on the shifting nature of identity and which draws attention to the constructed nature of cinema itself. Archival footage is intercut to disrupt the films’ representation of time and space, and to create both connections and friction between recent history and fictional visions of the future.”
Caoimhín will use the residency to create and produce a new body of work made up of two-screen film work alongside medium format photography and texts works. Titled All At Once Collapsing Together, it will be exhibited at a solo exhibition at the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny in March 2024. The project will examine the restorative power of nature, reconciling the reality of climate anxiety with the urge to heal or seek an escape from oneself through nature.
Caoimhín Gaffney is an artist working with the still and moving image, based between Dublin and Belfast, whose work has been shown in exhibitions and film festivals internationally. Gaffney’s work has been screened at the Cork Film Festival (2016 & 2018), the 10th Imagine Science Film Festival (New York, 2017) and at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2021), where it is part of the collection. Caoimhín recently completed a practice-led PhDon queer artist filmmaking, at Ulster University, and this work was shown in a solo exhibition at the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork (2020-21).
Iceland Artist Residency: Ráðhildur Ingadóttir
Ráðhildur Ingadóttir is an Icelandic artist. She works with a certain ideology, which she implements in a variety of media; text, drawing, painting, sculpture and video, usually presented as installations.
“”Contemplation on Gravity-Waves” is a series of drawings I started in 2021. Like the drawings of vortexes, which represent the movement of the entire universe in my work “Vortex” 1998 – 2021, they represent cosmic forces. Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in 1916 in his general theory of relativity, and the phenomena became confirmed as fact in 2017. The waves are ripples in space-time caused by some of the most violent and energetic processes in the Universe.
My projects usually start with drawings, but are also very much inspired by places. During the residency I would continue with the drawing series of gravity-waves in hope of it developing into a long term project connected to what I experience at Fort Dunree. As I have not been in Donegal before, I cant imagine how my project would develop. But there are many criteria, like the people of the area, the history, the language, the nature and the ancient cultural connections between Ireland and Iceland.
I was brought up and have lived most of my life in Iceland, which is, like Ireland an island in the Atlantic Ocean. This has influenced my way of thinking. I think a lot about space, which I see as nature. Living in Iceland gives you a strong sense of being in space, and how the human destiny is interwoven into the cosmic rhythms of space. I am very curious to see how being in the Donegal will affect me, and hope to bring from there experiences that will open new paths in my work.”
Ráðhildur has exhibited widely in both in Iceland and throughout Europe. Her work is in the collections of the Icelandic Museum of Art, the Reykjavík Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art. She has also worked widely as a curator, in 2013 and 2014 she received the honorary position of artistic director of Skaftfell – the center of art in the East.
Ráðhildur studied art in England 1981–1986, at Emerson College in Sussex and St. Albans College of Art and Design. She was a part-time teacher at the Iceland School of Art and Crafts and the Iceland Academy of Arts, 1992–2002, and also a visiting teacher at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. Ráhildur was on the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art 2000–2002. She lives and works in Copenhagen and Seyðisfjörður.
