Artist Residencies
Salting the Wound installation, Blast! residency programme. The Wolverhampton School of Art, 2023. Alex Billingham
Alex Billingham, Japhet Dinganga, Marley Starskey Butler, Polly Brant and Hannah Rollason.
Produced in partnership between Multistory and The Wolverhampton School of Art as part of Multistory’s artist development programme, the residency supports five emerging Black Country based artists each year with time, space, funding and critical mentorship. The artists’ presence activates the building as a site of exchange between students and the professional art world; opening access to the school's specialist facilities to the wider arts community, while contributing to a multidisciplinary culture of shared learning.
The programme culminates with the sharing of their work in an exhibition in the Wolverhampton School of Art’s foyer space, which is programmed to coincide with the yearly degree show. Rather than presenting work in its final state, the exhibition shares work in progress, reflecting the programme’s commitment to supporting practice as research, and providing space for artistic experimentation and play.
Alex Billingham
Alex Billingham shares a short film documenting their new performance Salting the Wound, which develops their research around the notion of Fluid bodies in relation to Crip theory.
“Our bodies are fluid and ever changing. This new performance brings together fluctuating identities and leaves space for the audience to explore their own alongside. BUT…. You’re not REALLY disabled tho! You’re a FAKE I saw you walk without a stick. You stood up from a wheelchair…. It’s a miracle. No BAB people are complicated and disability isn’t just a one badge this is who we are. We exist in a fluid state with multiple identities and needs overlapping. Balancing various Access needs. This theatrical show is currently emerging from its initial R&D phase and beginning to be programmed nationally.”
Japhet Dinganga
Open Space is a participatory project exploring how people in Sandwell can work together to reclaim their neighbourhoods. The project develops Japhet’s ongoing investigation into how we might reimagine disused or derelict spaces in order to best serve the community, and what a biodiverse cityscape looks like when it is entangled alongside our cultures, traditions, and social lives. Japhet shares speculative artworks created by community members attending the Dorothy Parkes Centre in Smethwick, alongside his sculptural assemblage works using reclaimed objects and materials. The reclaimed and assembled gives us potential to envision new ways of organising ourselves and relating to our histories and stories.
Marley Starskey Butler
Marley Starskey Butler shares a scanned image and a photograph from his new photobook Access Subject, a photography project that explores his relationship with his birth mother, and his children’s services records from age 0 to 3 whilst he was in her care. The installation also includes a short film clip showing Marley’s process of assembling the publication during his residency.
Polly Brant
For her residency, Polly Brant made a publication through a series of workshops with students at the art school exploring the importance of arts education, with its focus on creative and independent thought, and the threats it currently faces through cuts and underfunding. For the artist and many others art school is the first stepping stone of their artist practice; in her new publication A movement in the direction of trying to make sense, she explores the difficulties that art education faces alongside exploring what it could be and what it means to me.
Hannah Rollason
Passing Notes is a collaborative zine produced as part of Hannah’s research ‘The Pepper Project’; a series of texts, artworks and workshops exploring links between art and learning. The Pepper Project de-constructs, re-imagines and abstracts the pepper both physically and conceptually, exploring the open-ended process of learning and creativity. During her residency, Hannah also experimented with creating moulds and sculptures of a pepper; while the pepper itself is important the mould holds symbolic weight; it forms and shapes material much like the process of learning to be creative at school shapes our understanding of art and the world we live in.
Artist Biographies
Alex Billingham works with Live art / Experimental theatre and film to explore how their Trans and Disabled identities collide and intermingle. Franken fixing themselves together to explore their fluid body. Their work has recently been acquired by NAGW for their permanent collection. They like to make playful and silly work nestling in amongst the overgrowth of long abandoned fears of our nuclear heritage.
Japhet Dinganga. My practice is influenced by the everyday notion of being and becoming. I’m intrigued by ideas surrounding metaphysics and ontology, as a sense of observation and depicting the relationship between man and the materialistic space. Found objects and materials can instigate a history that shows evidence of humanitarian cultures, habits and social understanding. My work is an exploration of these indications and ideas, and it is always open to one’s interpretation of the composition within the space in time. I am interested in making this relevant to the context of the Midlands by creating interventions into disused spaces that make up the local landscape, to consider how these spaces could be used better, and more beneficially for the local communities.
Marley Starskey Butler. I make art, in particular; visual, audio, written and performance works. My work is about opposites, parallels, memory, love, loss, mortality, and the politics of belonging within self and in society. My concurrent practice as a Social Worker keeps me tied to the lives, stories, and experiences of the most vulnerable and complex members of society, whilst being a jigsaw piece in ensuring children in care have the best futures possible.
Polly Brant. Led by curiosity, pulling apart and reforming, I use the process of meeting people, learning, and making to build connections. I am interested in art as a common, a part of the everyday, a space for everyone. Art education is a big part of this and what it means to me forms the base of my practice. I am interested in what art education is, where it can happen and its meaning. A lot of the time what I make is made from collections of thoughts, notes, and hopeful ideas informed by research, in various forms, to both champion and question what art/art education can be.
Hannah Rollason. Embracing form, aesthetics, and the manipulation of media to draw out symbolism, Hannah Rollason employs metaphor and myth within the context of the work. With initial inspiration being personal exchanges and everyday visual influences while often drawing in subjects such as history, ecology, and social politics to create an interdisciplinary practice. Exploring the relationship between human and nature, specifically the interactions, connections and disconnections of urbanisation, agriculture and nature.
Fluid Bodies, 2022. Alex Billingham.
Open Space: An intervention on derelict spaces in Sandwell, 2022. Japhet Dinganga.
Access Subject, 2023. Marley Starskey Butler.
The Pepper Project, 2022. Hannah Rollason.
A movement in the direction of trying to make sense, 2022. Polly Brant