Group Residency AIR, SEA AND SOIL: DRAWING WITH PLACE.

The Group Residency has been devised by The Museum of Loss and Renewal with invited partner, artist and academic Danica Maier around the relationships of ‘Air, Sea and Soil’, encompassing the Orkney Islands’ remarkable natural environment. Residents will be welcomed to the historic Birsay area, where the bespoke programme will take place in the excellent accommodation and studio facilities of The Pier Arts Centre’s Linkshouse, and through accredited-guide visits to Neolithic Orkney’s World Heritage Sites. Expert introductions to land and spectacular wildlife will be provided by The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’ (RSPB) ‘Species on the Edge’ Project, paired with an artist’s talk.

The aim of the Group Residency is to develop drawing and approaches to drawing that are experimental, inventive in their form, and that respond to place by collectively investigating a site of global importance through making, reflecting and sharing.

Guided sessions such as ‘Visual Dialogue’, ‘Slow Looking’ and ‘Listening Environment’ will focus residents’ attention to detail. An underlying theme of ‘Micro-Macro’ will connect the group to the residency location and out to the wider world, in consideration of what one brings from a place and what is subsequently left in a place.

The Group Residency will provide opportunities for creative practitioners and researchers to share and establish a bank of knowledge and creative strategies, both globally interconnected and hyper local, digital and analogue, for imagining new responses to places and the multiple, layered and contested histories they hold. Residents will have ample time to pursue and share their individual projects. A final digital publication will be designed and published by The Museum of Loss and Renewal, and presented publicly.

Residents will be accommodated at Linkshouse, The Pier Arts Centre’s accessible residency facility with studio provision, that is a bequest from Barbara and Edgar Williamson, whose son artist Erlend Williamson drew inspiration from Orkney’s landscape and environment. Linkshouse is situated on the St Magnus Way pilgrimage route, on the Atlantic Ocean and amidst farmlands. Twin and double bedrooms are available. One room is partly accessible.

Applications are welcomed from creative practitioners who think through drawing and for whom drawing is a way to investigate and understand place, and from practitioners who have a strong interest in drawing as an area of practice. Creative practitioners may be working in art, animation, archaeology, architecture, communication industries, dance, design, fashion, film, theatre, performance etc. Applications from other fields where drawing is used as a means to develop, document, explore, explain, interrogate and plan are also invited.

The Residency Programme is operated on a non-commercial cost-covering basis, and is financially supported by The Museum of Loss and Renewal in order to keep fees low. The residency fee is £1485 GBP paid by the resident. It includes the residency programme, accommodation, full board, collection/return to nearest airport/ferry station, accommodation in a variety of en-suite rooms, studio spaces, and a collective publication (digital) published by The Museum of Loss and Renewal. Catering (3 meals each day) includes locally sourced Orkney ingredients, and meals prepared by our excellent cook. Vegan and vegetarian diets can be catered for.

We do not have external funding for this project, so regret that we are unable to offer assistance with fees, travel, production costs or other subsistence. Typically, successful applicants source funding by applying to their national arts funding bodies, personal fundraising, or through academic institutional support. Formal Letters of Invitation can be provided to assist in this process.