This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

Eight Scotland-based artists selected for artist residency exploring connections between arts and sustainability.

This Friday, Creative Carbon Scotland (CCS) will welcome eight Scotland-based artists from a variety of disciplines to Cove Park on the Rosneath Peninsula, for a weekend exploring and reflecting upon humanity’s impact on the planet and the role of the arts in transitioning to a more environmentally sustainable society.

Over 100 artists from across Scotland applied to be a part of this residency, which will equip artists with opportunities to think about the role of cultural practices, learn from one another and develop their own work in relation to environmental sustainability. Artists are not expected to produce new work during the short residency, but rather use the experience as a springboard for future development in relation to residency themes and wider social change.

Working in partnership with Cove Park, Creative Carbon Scotland’s third annual artist residency will focus on the Anthropocene, a period of geological time which places humanity at the centre of the recent global environmental changes.

On choosing the topic of the Anthropocene, CCS Director, Ben Twist, said: “The Anthropocene marks a significant shift in how we understand humanity’s role and responsibility in relation to issues such as climate change. Exploring this topic during the residency offers an important opportunity for Scotland’s artists to consider how their practices could contribute to a wider cultural movement towards a low-carbon future.”

Co-facilitating the artist residency will be Jan Bebbington, Professor of Accounting and Sustainable Development, St Andrews Sustainability Institute, and Lex ter Braak, Director, Van Eyck Institute, Maastricht, Netherlands. Joining the facilitation team, Jan Bebbington said: “I am excited to share time and conversations with this talented group of creative people and I am sure my understandings of the Anthropocene will change and deepen from the engagement. Residencies are wonderful settings in which to create shared understanding across disciplines and practice settings.”

Catrin Kemp, Assistant Director of Cove Park, said: “We are hugely excited to be welcoming CCS and those selected for this multidisciplinary Arts & Sustainability residency to Cove Park. This group will be the first to take over the entire 50-acre site since the opening of our brand new £1.4m Artists Centre. Cove Park offers artists from across the world a unique space to develop their ideas, and we hope that this residency will spark fresh creative thinking around how the major themes related to the Anthropocene might be communicated to audiences.”

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Notes to editors

For more information please contact Gemma Lawrence at: gemma.lawrence@creativecarbonscotland. com T: 0131 529 7909

This year’s arts and sustainability residency is funded by Creative Scotland and kindly supported by the Dr David Summers Charitable Trust and is run in partnership with Cove Park.

The full list of artists who will be attending Creative Carbon Scotland and Cove Park’s Arts and Sustainability Residency 2016 are as follows:

Reem Alkayyem

• Reem Alkayyem is a Syrian born and educated architect. She has practiced architecture for 15 years in her home country and has MScs from the University of Edinburgh in Architectural Project Mangagement (2012) and Advanced Sustainable Design (2016). She aims to enhance and disseminate the knowledge of sustainability to include the social and cultural aspects in addition to environmental. She is additionally keen to contribute to the reconstruction of her country and to educate future architects on sound and sustainable bases.

Kathyrn Beckett

• Kathy describes her creative practice as ‘in exploration of ecocentric approaches’, seeing that her responsibility and passion as an artist is to help serve a more beautiful life sustaining world. She works across a range of mediums, with people and nature at the core of her activity and, public engagement as a vehicle of expression. She has been contracted as a project artist concerned with environmental sustainability for a range of organisations, including the Glasgow School of Art, Creative Carbon Scotland and North Light Arts.

Simon Gall

• Simon Gall is a musician, composer, educator based in Aberdeenshire. He has toured (and continues to tour) internationally, recording with a number of artists including well-known world music band Salsa Celtica, Cuban band Son al Son and more recently contemporary Scottish folk duo Clype.

Alex Mackay

• Alex Mackay is a sound artist, composer and performer based in Glasgow, making work across media including sound/music, image and performance for a wide range of contexts, including recorded media, installation, live performance as well as collaborative work in the fields of visual art, dance and film.

Victoria MacKenzie

• Victoria MacKenzie is a fiction writer working on her first novel, Brantwood, about the life of art critic and social reformer John Ruskin, as well as a short fiction collection, Creaturely, which explores our connections with other species.

Michael Stumpf

• Michael Stumpf (born in Mannheim/ Germany) is a visual artist that works primarily in sculpture. In addition to his own practice he currently is a member of the artist group Poster Club. Recent exhibitions include: New Wheat New Mud New Machine (with Posterclub) Cooper Gallery, Dundee; Objects Converse on a Matter of Mutual Concern, Art Across the City, Swansea; This Song Belongs to those Who Sing It, Mackintosh Gallery, Glasgow School of Art; In Other Words, Lewis Glucksmann Gallery, Cork; New Alchemy /Contemporary Art after Beuys, Landesmuseum, Münster.

Samuel Tongue

• A hybrid of lyric and language poetry, Samuel’s practice is inter-medial and parasitic, living within, feeding from, and provoking a variety of artistic forms. Poems are search patterns, part of a meshwork of ideas and concepts, rooted in an incorrigibly plural world.

Jenna Watt

• Jenna Watt is a multi award winning Scottish theatre maker, her latest work; Faslane, written in part at Cove Park, received a 2016 Scotsman Fringe First Award at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.

Funded by Creative Scotland and the City of Edinburgh Council, Creative Carbon Scotland has been working since 2011 to embed environmental sustainability within the arts and cultural sector in Scotland and connect the arts with the environmental sustainability sector. The arts and sustainability residency has been running since 2014 and has already engaged artists in topics of future climate change scenarios and the post-2015 UN Sustainable Development Goals. The 2014 and 2015residencies were held on the Isle of Mull in partnership with Comar.

Founded in 1999 by Peter and Eileen Jacobs, Cove Park is funded by Creative Scotland, by trusts and foundations and by the generosity of individuals. Their contributions are made on the premise that the vitality of the arts today, and the contribution they make to society, is based on the ability of artists to make new work on an ongoing basis.

Photo credit: Ruth Clark

The post Press Release: Artists Selected for Residency Connecting Arts & Sustainability appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

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Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

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