Celine Skidmore

My artistic practice engages with national and racial identity, and culture. As a South African born British artist, I am interested in exploring the connections I have with both the British and South African landscape.

Fantasy of memory and landscape have been the main focal points for my current research and making. Through memory and the ways in which memory can be manipulated through fantasy, I intend to explore the landscapes that deprive one of the other and me from both.

During this short residency I hope to experiment with work that contrasts with the unrealistic South African landscapes I have created in the past. To recreate the natural areas around The Rodd by taking myself into the landscape before painting them from memory.

Instagram - @c.m.skidmore_art

Isabella Draper

Denial of function, domesticity and sexual division has been the focus of my most recent project. However, my artistic practice involves a wide range of materials and processes to explore an array of themes. I have experimented with drawing, digital imagery, sculpture, and installations. Repurposed and found materials, my body, and personal experiences have all been used as materials and inspiration for many of my works. Viewer interactivity runs throughout my work and appears in various forms. None of my work is restricted by ‘do not touch’ signs!

For this residency I will be continuing the theme of denial of function, taking the shape of cups and saucers. I will be challenging myself to create artworks influenced by underlying themes as well as taking inspiration from my stay at the Sidney Nolan Trust.

Instagram - @isabelladraperart

Works made during Isabella's recent residency

Sorell Matei

My current work engages with iconography in a way that seems to move between iconoclasm and a more nuanced form of engagement with their forms and symbolic power.

I use distortion: faces, identities, ideas to create a personal narrative through my paintings.
There is a soft line between figuration and abstraction in my work, deliberately moving from one to another, using distortion, blurring, and glitch effects to make expressive gestures. The hemp material I use in my work has the hair like quality and gives another dimension/layer of expression through the texture, my intention being to weave a story inside a story, the more you look the more you discover, in such a way the viewer is able to create the story himself. This material offers me the possibility to exaggerate inside the canvas, creating sculptural surfaces, something that I am very keen to explore further.

Meeting Nolan…
I am so much intrigued by the way my work will resonate and respond to such a unique space and experience. My intention is to investigate and explore, to experiment, connecting multiple bodies or mediums in my work and to discover if something new, something special can be brought to light. I have plans and I don’t: for example, I want to see how my work Stratum will evolve at The Rodd or how my portrait painting will evolve…but I keep the space open…all I know is that I intend to use everything that it will be given to me at maximum.

Instagram - @sorell.artist