a-n Artist Bursary

I’m delighted to be a recipient of this years a-n Artist Bursaries! This award offers funding to artists to undertake self-determined professional development over the coming year.

This bursary will enable me to travel to Orkney for one week in June to further a project about WWII-ruin-sites in Scotland's Northern Isles.

I first became interested in these eerie relics of 20th century conflict back in in 2015 when I spent a month visiting various war ruins around Shetland as part of a residency at Sumburgh Head Lighthouse. This summer, I will be able to collect more visual material from Orkney’s many former military sites, enabling my drawing practice to take new directions in this new landscape.

I will draw and photograph these strangely Modernist-utopian sites to explore through image-making a sense of interior, delineated human space ‘decaying’ away. This is part of an ongoing interest in exploring connections between ideology and image making, in-particular how forms of pictorial space reflect notions of self, time and decay. I seek to open up images as not just ‘captured realities’ but artefacts that continuously shape the present and our notions of utopia/dystopia.

Very many thanks to a-n for supporting artists, I’m very excited to start this project, and look forward to sharing more about this work here soon!

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This project is supported by a-n The Artists Information Company. Find out more at a-n.co.uk.

Images above from Sumburgh Head Lighthouse residency, 2015: Garth’s Ness, Sumburgh and Aith Ness.