PLACE, PEOPLE AND TIME
DIG AND DECLARE!
2022

This 2022 Group Residency DIG and DECLARE! was devised by The Museum of Loss and Renewal in response to a request by 7 artists, curators, producers and creative facilitators who are based in Scotland. It offered the participants space and time to reflect on their individual practices while working collaboratively on a co-authored publication. Residents were supported in the development of projects-in-progress such as exhibitions and published texts that were presented publicly in Scotland.

Each of the residents holds a BA Hons degree in Fine Art or in Art and Philosophy from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee (2017 – 2020). Funding for the Group Residency DIG and DECLARE! was provided by Creative Scotland.

Approach

The Group Residency provided a partially-structured and hands-on programme devised and lead by The Museum of Loss and Renewal’s Curators, Tracy Mackenna & Edwin Janssen.

Content and events were devised to enable residents to present, discuss and develop their individual practices in a co-learning environment. Designed to stimulate new ways of thinking and experimentation through production, research, learning and presentation, residents also worked on the production of a co-created publication as a platform for artistic encounters.

Practical and theoretical sessions based on ‘the book as a space of encounter’, ‘me, myself and I’, ‘populating the page’, ‘form, fonts and colours’ and ‘going public’ framed approaches to making, resesarch and conversation. A shared outcome was a ‘publication’ made up of audio-visual material collected and generated in and around Collemacchia, that was presented on the final day of the residency.

The Group Residency provided a supportive and stimulating environment to develop participants’ production skills and knowledge of their own practices, of co-working, of artistic publications and of public presentation platforms. A focus on knowledge exchange and future publics guided tailored sessions about the future direction of each individual’s practice and research.

PARTICIPANTS

Katherine Fay Allan

Katherine Fay Allan (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and creative facilitator based in Edinburgh. Her practice sits at the crossroads between art, life sciences and philosophy. Bringing areas of research together allows her to produce works that present health and illness subjectively while exploring potential outputs that provide cathartic experiences.

Katherine’s piece ‘The rest of us … we just go gardening’ was awarded the ‘Healthcare Designed in Dundee’ Award due to its therapeutic nature, and the ‘Iain Eadie Prize’ in 2019. Katherine has worked for the mental health charity Art Angel as a specialist art tutor running both Adult and Young Adult sessions. In 2020 she completed a co-created residency with Ninewells (Hospital) Community Garden and exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy as part of RSA/ New Contemporaries, receiving the ‘RSA Art Prize’.

Katherine was a co-director of GENERATORprojects, Dundee from 2020 – 2021 and EMBASSY, Edinburgh from 2021 – 2022 facilitating support to other emerging artists. Katherine has just completed her residency as part of the Hospitalfield Graduate Residency Programme. While in residence, she constructed an earthen oven to bake bread from heritage flour produced by ‘Scotland the Bread’ to explore notions around gut feelings.

www.katherinefayallan.com

Saoirse Amira Anis

Saoirse Amira Anis is a Dundee-based artist and curator whose practice prioritises radical care, informality and empathy.

Saoirse’s work is informed primarily by Black queer literature, her personal ancestry, and her own body as it moves through the world. She considers the ways in which the body holds ancestral and lived memories, particularly in relation to feelings of guilt, shame and inadequacy.

Saoirse thinks of her practice as a personal therapeutic process and aims to ensure that her creative undertakings are acts of self-care. She considers the beneficial ways in which we can share our vulnerabilities with others in order to reap the personal and political benefits of nurture.

www.saoirse-anis.com

Carol Amstrong

Curating memories of emotional and physical experiences in relation to my body I seek to offer these confused moments as I remember them: visceral, blurred, and inexact. Processing things I struggle to verbalise, I substitute sticky words with sticky images.

Following the loneliness of the last few Covid pandemic years, I feel the bodies I want to portray stretching desperately for reconnection. Searching for comfort in half-familiar spaces.

My methods of creation are playful and intuitive; a process of collection, curation and problem-solving. I strive to create a space reflective of how I feel and experience the world. There is catharsis in the construction of space for yourself, no matter how ephemeral this space is. Seeking the creation of space that holds familiarity but allows you to face and discuss the uncomfortable.

#c__arolol

Jamie Donald

Jamie Donald is an artist, writer and fish enthusiast. She has since contributed to artist-led activity in Dundee via her work on the GENERATORprojects committee (2019 – 2021) and as Head of a Few Different Things at Wooosh Gallery – the best gallery in the whole world (2019 -).

She has undertaken graduate residencies at Rhu Beag and the Scottish Sculpture Workshop (2019), a writing development programme engaging with artists’ moving image led by Lux Scotland, Alchemy Film & Arts and The Skinny (2021) and a short course in Contemporary Curation in Art and Design (2022).

With her Wooosh collaborators she has contributed to the In-Session unprofessional peer development programme and the Hospitalfield graduate residency programme. She has written for MAP Magazine and Front Left Scotland.

www.jamiedonald.com

Kaya Fraser

Kaya Fraser (she/her) was born, raised and currently lives in Perth, Scotland.

Kaya is a multi-media artist and writer working mainly with analogue photography, archives and amateur home movies. Within these mediums she has a collaborative community orientated practice. Using memory work, the home and its extended boundaries to the two housing schemes she grew up in, she celebrates the forgotten practices of The Everyday Archivist. Whilst interested in the ‘everyday’ and the modes of unconscious archives that exist in a working-class home, she encourages the remembrance of these practices and archives in others to highlight accessible culture and heritage during times of austerity.

In 2020 she received a Full Picture commission, to enable a small research project facilitated by Creative Dundee. Kaya explored low literacy levels and their impact on working-class communities’ access to art institutions. In 2021 she was awarded the Emerging Artist in Socially Engaged Practice Residency at Mount Stuart in Bute. This year long residency resulted in a collaborative community sound work using phone calls the artist had had with residents of two housing schemes in Rothesay, Bute. She is taking part in Hospitalfield’s Graduate Programme and Residency in Scotland, producing a new untitled anthotype series using the plants from the estate’s gardens to make anthotype prints.

www.theeverydayarchivist.com

Rhona Jack

Rhona Jack is a multi-disciplinary artist, living and working in Dundee, Scotland. She is currently chairperson of GENERATORprojects, a Dundee based artist-run initiative.

She was recently awarded a Cove Park Crisis Residency (2021) and a MERZ funded residency (2020), and took part in graduate residencies at Hospitalfield (2017) and The Glenfiddich Distillery (2018).

Recent exhibitions include ‘Hidden Door Festival’ (Edinburgh, 2021), ’Wear and Tear’ (Nomas* Projects, Dundee, 2021), ’Women in Print’ (Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, Santa Fe, 2020), Platform (City Art Centre, Edinburgh, 2020), Reduct (Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 2020), Satellite (Summerhall, Edinburgh, 2018).

Exploring cycles of production, consumption and waste, her work examines the role of the individual within these processes. Using second-hand clothes as a material, she delves into the dichotomy of the personal histories that we attach to clothing and their status as a throw-away commodity.

www.rhonajackart.co.uk

Laura Mcsorley

Laura Mcsorley is a curator and project producer living and working between Dundee and Scotland’s Black Isle. Laura was a committee member at GENERATORprojects until 2021. In 2020 she was in residence with The Museum of Loss and Renewal as part of the TAKING TIME / PRENDENDO TEMPO individual residency programme.

Laura is currently a member of the British Art Network – Emerging Curators Group and is working as Programme Assistant at the Edinburgh Art Festival.

Curatorially, Laura is interested in presenting contemporary art in non-visual ways, using all senses to share knowledge that can only be felt in the body, to cultivate brief moments of togetherness. She aims to work collaboratively to produce frameworks that can support artists and encourage collective care in a time of economic, political and environmental crisis.

#lauramcsroley