A group show boasting seven very different artists across a series of six residences begins tomorrow at the South Square Gallery in the village of Thornton near Bradford, running until the end of January 2015. Residual Projects marks the culmination of a yearlong collaboration between the gallery and the award winning Hepworth in Wakefield.
Responding directly to the South Square Gallery, a collection of former stonemasons’ cottages in the heart of Thornton, each artist will create a body of work which will be then left behind for the next artist to negotiate. “The result will be a group exhibition which grows week by week as different artists enter and leave the space,” says Charlie Booth making her debut as curator. “Residual Projects is a critical look at traditional artists residencies, where work will be created and installed whilst the gallery is open.”
The result will be a dynamic exploration of how artists can work collaboratively. With its well-established history as both an exhibition space and community centre for the last thirty years, the gallery offers artists the chance to draw inspiration from the remnants of previous exhibitions that have taken place in the space, as well as from the social history of the surrounding village. The show suggests different approaches to how artist residencies might be organised, punctuating short bursts of artistic activity with periods of reflection and evaluation.
Opening Residual Projects will be artist, Claire Weetman, whose work fuses the personal with the political. She combines starkly beautiful calligraphic techniques with public engagement and intervention: recently the north-west based artist addressed the plight of 9 million displaced citizens in Syria, through a combination of layered projection, rubber stamps and fingerprints, to mesmerising and hallucinatory effect.
Residual Projects runs from 5th December – 25th January 2015 at South Square Gallery, Thornton before transferring to Manchester in Spring 2015.