LB x a-n Artist Bursaries

As part of a shared commitment to supporting artists across the UK, Liverpool Biennial 2021, a-n The Artists Information Company and Open Culture have joined forces to provide five support and research bursaries of £1500 each for artists over March – June 2021, within the 11th edition of Liverpool Biennial. The selected artists are Youngsook Choi & Taey Iohe, Grace Collins & William Lang, Sophy King, Daksha Patel, and Rain Wu.

Delivered as part of the Liverpool Biennial public programme and in partnership with a-n during their 40th anniversary year, these bursaries invite artists to undertake a period of research in response to a new avenue of thinking. Reflecting the diversity of artist practices in The Stomach & The Port, applications were encouraged from artists working in all visual and sonic arts disciplines that reflected innovative and ambitious thinking.

The artists taking part in the bursary programme benefit from in-kind support from the Liverpool Biennial team, including the Programme, Marketing and Development departments, as well as a research trip to the festival. They have been invited to showcase their research and work in progress throughout the festival, either in person or digitally. These showcases take on a variety of different formats and provide further insight into the projects that the artists are developing.

The selected artists are each working with ideas that tie into the wider themes of The Stomach and the Port – developing projects around ideas such as symbiotic relationships with plants, the festival of Imbolc, wild swimming, LIDAR scanning natural spaces, and growing mycelium.

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Youngsook Choi and Taey Iohe

Youngsook Choi, in collaboration with Taey Iohe, has used the bursary to research colonial botany and shamanic plants; develop the ideas of inter-species symbiotic care; launch an experimental working group with invited practitioners whose works are anchored on decolonising botanical science; and set up mentoring sessions for further development beyond the bursary period. The working group had a public launch event on 15th June, more information and a recording of the event can be found below.

Youngsook Choi and Taey Iohe form Breakwater, a London-based Korean diaspora artist duo. With a mutual interest in counter-narratives of spiritual knowledge, folklore, and queer methodologies, Youngsook and Taey's collaborative practice centres around socio-politics of post-colonialism, climate justice, and migrant's lived experiences. As a recipient of an Arts Council England Project Grant, Breakwater has been running a collective healing project Becoming Forest for East and Southeast Asian diaspora, adopting a folk healing approach that values shared cultural identity, seasonal sense and natural environments as critical methodologies. Along with the radio commission by Arts Catalyst (2020-21), this bursary project is the stretch from their ongoing exploration of planetary healing, colonial taxonomy in botanical science and non-white bodies in natural landscapes. Choi and Iohe both currently live and work in London.

Learn more about their practice:

Online seminar - Rewilding Knowledge: Cosmopolitics, Stone Womxn, Bluecarbon and Illegal Seeds

Tuesday 15 June, 11am - 1pm

Decolonising Botany is a working group of artists/researchers with a focus on challenging and complicating the colonial system of knowledge production around nature science, ecology and migration. Its unconventional research and art practices explore alternative methodologies, counter-perspectives and experimental collaboration with other-than-human. In the launch of Rewilding Knowledge, the working members shared the trajectories of seeding ideas and relevant practices.

This seminar took place on zoom, you can watch the recording here.

Grace Collins and William Lang

Building on recent immersive performance and installation Host of Nothing (2020), Grace Collins and William Lang have returned to hosting each other's practices to create a short film Past the tree line, details of which can be found below. Host of Nothing was an immersive performance and installation created for the winter solstice, wherein Collins and Lang hosted each othersʼ practices. They have developed this piece by reflecting on Imbolc (meaning “in the belly”), a festival of anticipation, which is thematically relevant to the wider biennial and their own research. Re-interpreting both of their process-led participatory practices through video provides a relevant option to share immersive performative artworks with audiences within current restrictions.

Grace Collins is a participatory artist from St Helens who works with other people to create new artworks about magic, mental health, and chairs. William Lang is a performer and dance artist based in Liverpool, whose practice explores queerness, the un-trained body and the ephemeral through improvisation scores. Both Collins and Lang currently live and work in Merseyside.

Learn more about their practice:

And check out this blog post that Grace and Will have written as a first extract from their bursary collaboration here.

Online screening: Past the Tree Line

Saturday 26 June, 12pm - 12am

'Past the tree line' is a new film created by Grace Collins and William Lang as part of their bursary project.

Two people, one night, have the same dream. They meet through an online message board for people whose dreams have a partner. They’re sure that someone else must feel the anticipation of waiting for flowers to bloom, nestled under the ground you are told not to walk on...

Sophy King

Sophy King has used the bursary to learn to record sound (underwater and above) and to enhance editing skills, through masterclasses and mentorship by industry professionals. This technical development has supported her current work about wild swimming through the pandemic. It has also enabled her to establish contacts, exploring this work’s dissemination.

King’s early career creating public artworks developed, via Landscape Architecture, into a multidisciplinary practice addressing the intersection between human and non-human activity. Her recent MA Fine Art at MMU considered the environmental and cultural implications of peat consumption, ecosystem depletion and the climate crisis. King currently lives and works in Manchester.

Learn more about her practice:

You can read more about Sopy's exciting developments via her blog post here. You can also view a clip of Adjusted Horizons work in progress below.

Daksha Patel

Daksha Patel was based at Invisible Flock’s studio in Yorkshire Sculpture Park for the duration of the bursary period, where she was mentored in the use of LIDAR scanner technology. She experimented with LIDAR in the field, by scanning water in the nearby lake and exploring projecting the scans on the surface of the water.

Patel’s practice engages with scientific processes of visualisation, measurement and mapping. Recent residencies include Anatomy, King’s College (current), Life Science, Dundee University (2018), and Mathematics, Bristol University (2019). Recent solo exhibitions and events include Dundee Contemporary Arts (2019), Paper2 Gallery, Manchester (2019), Waterman Arts, London (2018), Horniman Musuem, London (2017), and LifeSpace, Dundee (2017). Patel currently lives in Manchester and works in Salford.

Learn more about her practice:

Check out two blog posts Daksha has written about her time at Invisible Flock here and have a look at her work in progress below.

You can also watch a recorded interview with Daksha in the Studio Visit section of the website here.

Rain Wu

Rain Wu has used the bursary to purchase mycelium and set up a grow room in her studio. Throughout the duration of the Biennial, she has researched and developed the ‘cast-growing’ technique using custom-made molds with a goal in developing an aesthetic language from the material itself.

Wu is a Taiwanese artist and architect whose work is conceptually driven and materialises in different forms and scales from drawing, sculpture, food performance to architectural installation. She graduated from the Royal College of Art and University College London (Bartlett). Her artwork has been exhibited in Sharjah Biennial, Taipei Biennial, The Palestinian Museum, London Design Biennale, Lisbon Architecture Triennale; she was one of the Designers in Residence at the Design Museum, London (2016), an artist in residence at The Van Eyck (2018-19), and she is an associate lecturer at University of the Arts London. She currently lives and works in London.

Learn more about her practice:

You can watch a recording of Rain's online in conversation with Assistant Curator Abi Mitchell via the Biennial's Instagram TV.

a-n The Artists Information Company

a-n is the largest artists’ membership organisation in the UK, representing more than 21,000 artists and arts organisers. We support and act on behalf of our membership and the visual arts sector to improve artists’ livelihoods, to inform cultural policy and to affirm the value of artists in society. Through our membership services, the delivery of a creative programme and advocacy, a-n champions the rights and voices of practising visual artists in the UK today. In 2021 a-n celebrates its 40th anniversary year with a dedicated programme of activity.

For more information visit a-n.co.uk

Open Culture

Open Culture is a social enterprise which aims to increase the profile of, and engagement with the arts in Liverpool. Working across multiple art forms we nurture artists and audiences through a variety of projects and events; connecting artists and audiences to make people happier.

For more information visit www.culture.org.uk

With additional thanks to the Independents Biennial for their support on the selection process.

Related

Rewilding Knowledge - Cosmopolitics, Stone Womxn, Bluecarbon and Illegal Seeds

Daksha Patel - Studio Visit