Artist Residencies

Sarah Byrne, Dale Hipkiss, Shannel James, Quennie Lim and Zara Masood.

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.

Sarah Byrne

Sarah Byrne uses heritage crafts as a method of creating connection, celebrating relationships, and holding space for reflection. Researching the historical parallel that textiles and crafts have to grief and recovery, she questions the role that these domestic acts of care have within a contemporary art practice. While in residence, Sarah spent time reflecting on the 10-year relationship she had with the Wolverhampton School of Art. Comparing her relationship with the building to a human friendship, she began a process of personifying the building while creating and gifting it its own yarn artwork. The colours chosen were selected in conversation with studio visitors during the residency period, and the resulting yarn forms a love letter which is not just reflective of her relationship with this building, but all the friendships formed here.

Dale Hipkiss

Good Food Should Be A Lot Cheaper Than It Is Now! For his residency, Dale set up a small shop in the residency studio, handing out food in exchange for peoples thoughts on the economy and a constructive conversation about how things can be made better. Students mapped how they spent their time and contemplated what they value. Subsidising food at the point of sale is just one of those ideas that would instantly improve people's lives! The “free market” is really bad at looking after the physical, emotional and mental health of the vast majority of people. Wealth accumulation helps very few and is awful at discerning where resources should be distributed. Subsidising food at the point of sale is just one way to redistribute wealth. To not do so is a political choice. Doughnut Economics describes letting go of growth as the indicator for a healthy economy and proposes that an economy should be judged healthy if it meets the needs of its people without eroding the environment. Brown paper bags which were used to distribute food have been used to promote this economic theory and were presented in the exhibition to distribute potatoes.

Shannel James

Shannel’s new work ‘Unravelled Mind: Threads of Dissociation’ combines elements of mental health challenges and their impact on individuals. The word 'unravelled' suggests a sense of disconnection or fragmentation, reflecting the concept of dissociation which is often associated with mental health challenges. It symbolises the unravelling of thoughts and emotions, and experiences that might occur when facing such challenges. The medium used in the installation is a mixture of restoration and textiles. Restoration techniques are employed to preserve and protect the structurally sound elements of the piece, while textiles are utilised to add depth and visual interest. This residency has been a canvas for my creativity, allowing me to fully engage with the resources available, particularly the rich array of equipment in the textiles department.

Quennie Lim

During her residency, Quennie explored archives kept in family albums within the Filipino West Bromwich community, looking into the relationships and spaces of care that are created within them. She conversed across generations in a range of dinner gatherings and celebrations to find out how distant families build, restore, and preserve kinship, as well as discussed her own personal experience migrating from the Philippines to the UK. Her installation Balikbayan shared photographs from her personal family archive alongside a Balikbayan box filled with food and gifts. Quennie’s practice explores archiving as an act of resistance; the artist seeks to address a lack of representation for the Sandwell Filipino diaspora within local archives, with the residency acting as a test-bed for a new long-term oral history project that holds space for the stories of the women in her community. The photographs in the installation were printed on printer paper and marked with the artist’s fingerprints, speaking to the everyday of connecting internationally, and to the intimacies of the work.

Zara Masood

FEAST ON ME is a new textile work informed by an exploration of the duality of the artist’s British and Pakistani identity, the relationship between coloniser and colonised and what that means in relation to her and how she makes work. During her residency, Zara held a series of participatory workshops where students of The Wolverhampton School of Art were invited to make work and respond to the legacies of the BLK Art Group. FEAST ON ME interrogates the legacies of colonialism and questions the expectations often placed on artists of colour to share their experiences of trauma for white audiences; the artist chose to position the artwork so that the public is met with the back of the work as they enter the gallery space.