Wysing Arts Centre has announced the artists who will be working on its forthcoming residency programme. They are: Olivier Castel, Julia Crabtree and William Evans, Jesse Darling , and Alice Theobald.
Wysing’s large rural site near Cambridge comprises artists’ studios, education and new media facilities, a gallery and project spaces, a 17th century farmhouse and outdoor sculptures and structures. For the last decade, it has experimented with innovative ways to support the production of new work through residency and retreat formats.
The theme for its autumn residency programme, to mark the centre’s 25th year, is The Future: ways in which artists can explore and make sense of how we live today and what possibilities for future might contain.
Running parallel, a public programme of events will also take place, where the artists and other invited speakers will give presentations on their ideas around the theme. Work developed at Wysing goes on to be exhibited in its gallery and through its network of partner organisations nationally and internationally.
Ephemeral forms, shared experiments
The selected artists represent a diverse range of approaches. Oliver Castel has created work under 300 different identities during his career, using ephemeral forms in his practice such as projections, light, surface, text and audio. Julia Crabtree and William Evans have worked collaboratively for the last nine years in what they describe as an ‘experiment in shared subjectivity’ fusing sculpture with video, print and performance.
Jesse Darling also works in sculpture and installation, examining how structures – from the architectural to philosophical – manifest in physical and social bodies. Alice Theobald operates within live performance, video and installation, exploring the tension between authenticity and spectacle, form and feeling, and cliché and collective empathy. She works with moving image, text, spoken word, dance and music.
Wysing’s director, Donna Lynas said: “We are looking forward to working with such an interesting group of artists at Wysing this autumn. We’ve been developing our residency programme so that we can increasingly offer support to more established artists as well as those at the beginning of their careers, and it’s exciting to be able to give them this springboard at a key point in the development of their practices.”
