CFPR Artist Residencies
The artist in residence programme presents a truly exciting opportunity for collaboration and the enrichment of the CFPR’s research activities. Artists and designers will make a body of work that contributes to the CFPR archive and the editions portfolio. They will bring a curiosity and range of interests in areas such as fine art, print, product design, robotics, electronics, software, manufacturing, and materials science, encouraging new and productive research partnerships. As well as producing a body of work, resident artists will deliver a range of inspiring talks and participative sessions to our researchers and student community.
We are delighted to share further information below about some of our current and upcoming residencies at CFPR.
Rodrigo Arteaga
Rodrigo is a Chilean artist who completed a MFA in Sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art in 2018. His practice is concerned with the complex relationship between nature, culture and representation. His interest in working across different areas of thought has led him to collaborate with specialists in fields such as Microbiology, Bio-Fabrication, Mycology, Natural History, Botany, and Architecture. His work often deals with the complexities between human and non-human relations, unearthing the coded enigmas of our relationship with the environment.
Rodrigo worked in collaboration with researchers at the CFPR to use mycelium to produce non-human drawings, photographic images and sculptures to make visible what normally happens beneath the ground. He has undertaken experiments to make his own paper using substrates where mycelium can spread and become visible. He experimented with cultivating mould in paper in forms that could be preserved as drawings. Further experiments included 3D printing with clay and hemp as a biosensor and CNC machining to create relief surfaces imitating lichen growth. Rodrigo worked in Bristol’s Leigh Woods in June 2022 and his work featured in the Arnolfini’s summer exhibition Forest: Wake this Ground. Rodrigo was a keynote speaker at our IMPACT 12 Multidisciplinary Printmaking Conference 21 – 25 September 2022.
Images:
L: Rodrigo Arteaga portrait
R: Work currently on exhibition at Forest: Wake this Ground, Arnolfini, Bristol
Featured image top of page: Rodrigo Arteaga mycelium print made at CFPR. Etching with white ink on black somerset paper. 10 x 15 cm. 2022.
State of Print
The State Of Print (SOP) is a proposition; it is an evolving visual declaration initiated by a collective of artists beguiled and amused at the catastrophe of current social and political thinking and the comedy of established systems of governance.
The artists have therefore elected to cast adrift on a nonsense of their own (print)making—a makeshift non-geographical region built upon a fluid statute of ink and a constitutional raft of recycled cardboard. The intention has been to explore the current state of nations through the proposition that everything that formalises a nation state is printed – currency, maps, laws, passports, governance, news and information, cultures, doctrines and communications and so on…
At a time when the current state of nation power globally is inflexible and dogmatic, this project provides a creative and theoretical antidote to the current paradigm.
The State was founded during a residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Monaghan, Ireland, in October 2016 and has since been manifest in a variety of forms and a series of locations. These have included Dundee, Aberdeen, Santander (Impact 10), Barcelona, Norwich, Preston, Cork, Limerick and most recently, presented online at the Impact 11 Conference, Hong Kong. The state has expanded at each manifestation to incorporate an increasing range of artworks and artefacts produced by the initial founders and an incrementally increasing number of contributing artists who have elected to become citizens of the state – and currently number over 100.
These artefacts include not only the documentary material such as photographs, films, recordings, and reviews of the series of performative events/exhibitions but also the artefacts of the state such as printed currency, passports, flags, maps, ceremonial medals newspapers and public information material. Additional items also include cultural artefacts such as the, National Costume, National Anthem and Eurovision entry as well as games and animations based on state myths. This material is currently being reconfigured and accessioned into the State Archives of the State Museum – to be published in the near future.
Following their residency at CFPR, the State of Print opened the 2022 IMPACT International Printmaking Conference in Bristol with a ‘Twinning Ceremony’, followed by a procession and exhibition at the Old Fire Station. The Ministry of SOP invited the IMPACT 12 audience to participate in the new phase in the evolution of the State. It was an event that further explored the notion of contested spaces – and one that seemed all the more poignant in the current climate.
State of Print Artists: Paul Liam Harrison, Catherine Hehir, Scott Hudson, Noelle Noonan
Images:
L: IMPACT12 opening procession from City Hall Bristol, led by the State of Print with the Sambistas band
R: MA Print workshop at CFPR led by State of Print
Tracy Hill
Tracy Hill studied Fine Art at Bournville School of Art, Birmingham, Sheffield Hallam University and The University of Central Lancashire, Preston. She is the joint research lead of the Artlab Contemporary Print Studios at the University of Central Lancashire, which tests the relevance of printmaking in contemporary, mainstream art by innovation and expanding print practice through a process of continuing collaborative dialogues with artists. Her cross-disciplinary practice investigates and reconsiders the relationship between our developing digital capabilities and the aesthetics of the traditional hand created mark.
Tracy is working with Dr Nazmul Karim at the CFPR to undertake innovative material and technological investigations to combine traditional printmaking with the super conductive possibilities of Graphene. Utilising digital laser cutting tools and hand cutting, a series of woodblock plates will be printed in combination with layers of screen printed graphene, creating a print containing the possibility to conduct energy when touched with a human hand. The intention is to create an editioned print, which has the potential to engage a viewer through visual, sonic and sensory experiences. The aim is to demonstrate the potential of combining traditional and novel print processes to challenge perceptions of the printed image as being purely visual. To propose the concept that vision should be regarded as an extension of touch, in collaboration with other senses to fully understand the world. Tracy was a keynote speaker at the IMPACT 12 Multidisciplinary Printmaking Conference 21 – 25 September 2022.
Images: Ephemeral Bodies Exhibition
Matt Smith
Matt explores how history is a constantly selected and refined narrative that presents itself as a fixed and accurate account of the past. Using techniques of institutional critique and artist intervention, his work investigates how museums can be reframed from an outsider, often LGBTQ, perspective by taking objects and repurposing them in new situations, or creating ‘lost objects’. Solo shows have included Queering the Museum (2010) at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Flux: Parian Unpacked (2018) at the Fitzwilliam Museum and Losing Venus (2020-2022) at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. In 2016 Matt was awarded an AHRC funded practice-based PhD from the University of Brighton exploring the intersection of contemporary art practice and queer identities. From 2017-2022 Matt was Professor of Craft at Konstfack University in Stockholm and in 2016 was artist-in-residence at the V&A where he explored how historic figurines could address questions of representation within the museum. His residency at the CFPR will build on this work.
Matt will 3D scan existing ceramic figurines and digitally manipulate and rescale them before reprinting them in ceramic and firing them. These new figurines will form part of a planned future large-scale solo show. The source figurines are a combination of bought figurines and figurines from museum collections. The work aims to unpick the ceramic figurine from numerous points of view, including race, class, gender, taste and sexuality. This residency will technically challenge Matt’s practice into a new way of working and test his ceramic knowledge drawing on the expertise of researchers in the CFPR.
Images:
L: Flux: Parian Unpacked, Fitzwilliam Museum
R: For the Love of the Master:25 Artists Fascinated by Piranesi, Dublin Castle, Photograph by Mark Stedman
Alicia Paz
Alicia Paz is a painter and sculptor based in London who studied MA Painting at Royal College of Art in 2008 and Postgraduate Diploma at Goldsmiths College, London in 2000.
Born and raised in Mexico, before living in the US, France and now the UK, Alicia’s work is informed by her personal experience and offers a reflection on transcultural representation, particularly that of women. Through her paintings and sculptures, Alicia explores cultural hybrids, representations of family, and the complexities of kinship and lineage in a globalised world. Her work often incorporates elements from applied and decorative arts as a tool for interweaving narratives and exploring displacement and identity. Illusion and materiality, as well as ornamentation, feature strongly in her work.
Most recently, Alicia has been researching the historic collections of Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, to inspire a new body of work using the technique of photograms. During her residency at CFPR, she is exploring translations of these photographic images into printed fabrics and other supports, with hand-painted interventions, to be displayed on a folding screen structure. The aim is to create a labyrinth of interrelated images, as a rich dialogue between painting, photography, print and sculpture. Alicia also hopes to make a three-dimensional edition in ceramic or glass, reflecting on costume and attire. While in Bristol, she will explore local historic locations to inspire further works in print.
Alicia’s project is developed in partnership with S1 Artspace in Sheffield and Chatsworth House.
Images:
L: Untitled, 2019, Photogram, Ilford satin paper, 30.5 x 24 cm. Part of the “Shadow Play” series of portraits and masks, first shown at the Leonora Carrington Museum in SLP, Mexico.
R: Installation view of solo show “The Garden of Follies” at Kunstmuseum Magdeburg in Germany, 2016.
