The School of Design and Creative Arts is a host university to the Artists Access to Art Colleges (AA2A) scheme, providing artists with access to workshops and equipment to support their creative careers.
Each year the school welcomes resident artists, with five new students joining the cohort for 2023/2024 who will benefit from working alongside practising artists in the studios, world-class facilities, and technical expertise.
Meet the artists and learn more about the projects they will be working on during their residency:
Wanting to create more ambitious 3D work in making the non-physical become physical, Courtney will continue to work on a project that was started during a residency in New York called the Total Rebrand Retreat and hopes to expand her practice.
As an artist without a studio it can be difficult to feel involved with a community of peers to discuss work and ideas in productive ways. I think it's important to have conversations around your work as an artist, so the chance to have these kinds of exchanges with fellow AA2A artists, students and the university staff was really motivating.
Emily hopes to expand her ceramic practice of how different materials alter both clay and glaze composition, which will involve extensive experimentation and testing. It will integrate a method of both walking and collecting, something which Emily developed during her time at university.
I have been collecting sand and brick from the streets of my city and I'm interested in firing these and other found material. I would like to test combine the materials into different clay body types and would also like to experiment with these materials in glaze recipes and in surface explorations. I'm also interested in developing my own glaze recipes, with a specific interest in the structural potential of glaze.
Looking to create a new series of works focusing on local working-class history and folklore, Grime wants to create more ambitious work and having access to the facilities will allow for the re-introduction of print alongside other techniques, and make temporary installations that explore labour, memory and the queer body.
I hope to gain new insights into my practice and explore new avenues of research. I do not see my work as a solid whole or repetition, my art making is in a state of constant flux and this scheme, I hope, will mould it in unexpected ways.
Hoping to use the experience to meet new peers and make new connections and to work on different ideas, Sheila will be exploring the history of gun making in Birmingham and working on a new work called Atmospheric Forces, a collaborative live artwork in collaboration with artist Sue Palmer.
The AA2A scheme gives me proximity to a wealth of experts in a variety of subjects that could potentially complement and feed into my practice. I love to work with researchers and those knowledgeable in fields other than art. I’ve done that for a long time - perhaps I will also meet some new collaborators.
Sophie is looking to capture recent memories and moments of care, nourishment, and comfort abstractly into her work, utilising the mundane, magical and exhausting events of early motherhood by collating an archive of iPhone photographs and scans, water ripples, whirlpools, tidal pools, feeding, osmosis within the natural world, biological membranes and storms to produce a series of small etching plates that encompass this idea of transformation, shapeshifting and mother nature.
I feel etching and papermaking is the most appropriate medium and experimentative process to truly capture and have fun with this investigation due to its slow and necessity for a controlled environment - something that has inevitably become totally non-existent in recent months.
Find out more about the AA2A scheme via their website.