Along with her journey to where she is now as a designer, the most inspiring thing that I learned about today was Art Residencies. I had no idea what these were when Rose first mentioned it but after some questioning, she explained. This inspired me to look further into this as a concept and a way of getting work when I'm finished at University.
Artist-in-residence programs and other residency opportunities exist to invite artists, academicians, curators, and all manner of creative people for a time and space away from their usual environment and obligations. They provide a time of reflection, research, presentation, production and immersion into a new culture.
- They often allow an individual to explore their practice within another community; meeting new people, using new materials, experiencing life in a new location and potentially integrating elements of that experience into their art.
- Art residencies emphasise the importance of meaningful and multi-layered cultural exchange and immersion into another culture.
- Some residency programs are incorporated within larger institutions. Other organisations exist solely to support residential exchange programs.
- Residencies can be a part of museums, universities, galleries, studio spaces, theatre, artist-run spaces, municipalities, governmental offices, and even festivals. They can be seasonal, ongoing, or tied to a particular one-time event.
- They exist in urban spaces, rural villages, container ships and deep in nature. Hundreds of such opportunities and organisations exist throughout the world.
- Operating an artist-in-residence program costs money.
- Some residency programs cover all costs for the artist, some offering stipends, others don't cover any costs at all. It is not unusual that residential art centres cover the costs only partially, which may make it necessary for the artist to find additional funding. In some countries artists can apply for subsidy at state governed bodies.
- There are some international beneficiary funding schemes, most important of which is the Unesco-Aschberg residency funding scheme.
I took the time to look up some websites that offered opportuntities like these and found a large variety. This is definitely something I will be looking into more and take further still by applying once I have graduated. This has been a huge learning objective for me as before today I had no idea about this sort of thing.
