Prickly Pear:
A J&J
Digital Residency
9 October -
20 November 2022
We are so excited to share the seven artists we’re working with as part of our Prickly Pear digital residency!
We wanted to give emerging artists and recent grads a paid opportunity to develop a new piece of work! Inspired by BLOB, the show Shae went to in London and wrote a Notes On… piece about, we issued a prompt to inspire a new work; the prompt we asked the artists to respond to is:
Tell us a secret…
Throughout the 6 week digital residency we will be meeting several times for workshops/critiques & discussions to develop the work. At the end of the residency, we’ll create and distribute a publication showcasing the works that were created.
Meet the artists below!
Carla Smith
📍 Edinburgh/Aberdeen, Scotland
Carla’s proposal concerns food and the secrecy that surrounds it. She’s interested in the confessional outlets of food, as well as incorporating audience interaction into her work. During the residency, she’s aiming to make a zine that acts as a confessional archive, drawing from ideas around comfort foods. Carla is currently based at Peacock’s in Aberdeen and is enjoying testing out printmaking techniques like riso.
Some collages that Carla has made as development.
Colton Sampson
📍 Seattle, US
We loved Colton’s proposal, which was formed on the little known secret that the blackberry bush was the inspiration for modern barbed wire. “Since its creation in 1873 it has been one of the most effective methods of creating barriers, dividing landscapes, and providing protection. From a moderately harmless plant to the dangerous wire the links between these two objects holds an interesting insight into our past choices and our current perception of the human made world.” Colton is working on a large sculpture, depicting an abstracted blackberry plant that weaves and morphs into a barbed wire line.
Digital models Colton’s been working on to inform the final piece.
Helen Lin
📍 New York City, US
Helen’s proposal will be exploring “the histories of missed connections, awkward interactions, and relationships distanced from poor communication [which] are all parts of being human, yet they make us feel isolated or outsider when we go through them. The breakups, the fights, and the misunderstandings all shape who we are today and prove to be helpful learning experiences, but they also tend to be the painful memories that we try to forget.” She’s gonna be making friendship bracelets that represent these missed connections, and document their life.
A few of Helen’s friendship bracelets.
Katie Brown
📍 Victoria, BC
A while back, Katie stumbled upon a giant bag of matchbooks in a thrift store, and immediately wondered where that person had been and why they saved these objects for so long. “In my head, I started to get ideas of who this person could have been and what adventures they had taken, weddings they had been to, secret rendezvous in swanky hotel rooms and meals they had eaten. (personally, I think that they were probably allergic to peanuts) I was given a peek into the world of someone completely unknown to me.” They plan to embark on creating a piece in which each matchbook gets its own story, written from the perspective of the original owner as if it were from their diary. The matchbooks will spill some of their secrets and bridge together to create a fictionalized narrative in which one hopefully, will gain insight into the interpersonal nitty gritty of this “so-called” mystery person.
A still from Katie’s video work “Cyclical Ice Cream” (2020)
Leandra Brandson
📍 Winnipeg, Canada
Leandra’s project involves looking at the act of telling of a secret, interpreting it into a physical, then digital form. Through clay, she plans to construct a series of forms. “I want to look at the human body closely and critically, selecting parts of myself I think tell stories… Clay has a miraculous quality; it can mimic human skin with ease. It has luminosity and weight akin to our bodies. In pulling together a series of amorphous bodily forms, I am recreating snippets of my body. These little snapshots of me mark the beginning of the telling. They will be unfired, and at the end of the residency I shall return them to the earth from whence they came, just as the basis of the secret exists in only a moment.”
Leandra’s unfired ceramic piece, A Bird in the Hand (2022)
Niamh Dale
📍 Westmidlands/London, UK
Niamh is embarking on a new series of large scale speculative drawings.
Her proposal asked, “What if your bones could talk? What if my bones could talk? What if my bones could talk to yours and spill all my secrets… Or listen to yours…” She plans to re-define the notion of ‘body language’, to use the extremely innate (body parts) to examine the extremely innate (secrets). “I want to push through the surface of our existence and dwell inside the human interior.”
An example of one of Niamh’s drawings, ‘A close-up of a human skull’ (2022)
XY Zhou
📍 New York City, US
XY is planning on creating a painting that represents the intimacy and closeness they have built in their relationship with their partner. They are exploring the small secrets and vulnerabilities that present themselves along the way during a long-term relationship… “an allergy to carrots, a tendency to talk to himself while doing homework problems, or a breathing pattern that indicates deep sleep."
XY’s painting, porcelain girl 01, (2021)