Residency and exhibition at Mura Ma Art Space
Six artists are co-creating an immersive artists residency and exhibition at Mura Ma Art Space from 28 March-20 April 2024. Titled Beyond the frame, the artists will be challenging traditional ways of presenting art, revealing the process of making, discussion and experimentation usually reserved for the studio, and to see what happens in a co-working space.
Visitors to the gallery are invited to observe the artists’ work in progress as it unfolds, whilst the artists consider the threads and themes that connect their work and ask, ‘what is the value of collective creativity?’ To see what happens when they leave the singular studio environment.
The residency is the first time the artists will work together as Studio 8 Collective. It follows a three-month programme of peer-led studio visits and critiques facilitated by Nan Collantine of Mura Ma to investigate a collective and peer-led approach to developing an artists’ creative practice. Each artist is now planning a new piece of work that will be realised, and collaboratively developed and presented in the gallery.
Sarah Connell plans to use the residency to break free from the traditional methods of presenting and exhibiting her work, which is conventionally, the end-product, mounted and framed and placed onto the gallery wall. By focusing on the viewers emotional experience, she will harness the use of prints, projection, and installation to create an immersive space that challenges how photography is traditionally viewed and experienced.
Bernadette Bone will explore the emotional experience of being a female architect within a male classified world. She will be challenging the restrictions and erasure of that journey by gifting herself the freedom to play, experiment, fail, and find form of her own story. The solidarity and support of the artists and space itself providing the safety for such expression. She will be using familiar mediums and methods alongside new materials and sculptural forms. Breaking free from her highly skilled approach into areas of raw form, yet, unknown.
Yvonne Noworyta will be working with lost and care-worn ephemera to delve into ideas around sentimentality and objecthood, how beloved belongings are instruments for the holding and treasuring of memory. Yvonne intends to construct a lamp, ‘to shine a light in the darkness of recent times’ to light for her final piece for the exhibition. She is inviting people to get involved with this ‘Beacon of Bane’ project by donating broken brooches, earrings, bangles or necklaces that have lost their backs, clasps or fixings and costumes that have lost part of their original ensemble.
Mair Doyle’s work responds to the environment in which she lives, which is a former textile mill near Marple. She considers herself a caretaker for the site in which wildlife has been allowed to flourish in this early industrial landscape, and her studio a research space in which she maps and records the plants and landscape through compiling visual notes, works on paper, drawing, painting and collage. Teaching workshops on the site is a way of sharing her enthusiasm for both art and her surroundings. During the residency she’ll be working on an installation that explores nature escaping boundaries.
Suzanne Bethell is interested in recording psychological states through painting and drawing and she is using the residency to experiment with the technique of expanded painting to potentially create a larger scale installation. She will be demonstrating her process in the gallery, responding to music using colour and marks across unfolding rolls of paper.
Suzie McDaniel will continue to develop her latest project, which celebrates female swimmers and feminine autonomy through her rendering of 3D female figures that appear dive into large clay pots. She will be treating the residency as a research exercise, working with 3D paper collages and other materials, to explore sculptural ideas for future works in clay.
The gallery is open from Thursday-Saturday from 28 March-20 April for visitors to drop in and see them at work.
The final exhibition takes place from 18-20 April. An artist’s talk will take place on Thursday 18 April, 7-9pm in which the artists will discuss the process and the impact on their work, and the experimental nature of the collective residency.
Find out more about Beyond The Frame at Mura Ma
