Thanks to support from Arts Council Wales and Rogue Artists Studios' co-director David Gledhill I was able to spend 5 weeks on a Manchester residency there in 2024. The artist accommodation is in the former caretaker’s house, overlooking the looming listed former school that now houses over 80 artists in the studios.
I wondered how to enter into the life of such a rich place and community and what kind of work it might inspire. With alarms going off in the night, and awareness of the massive task of maintaining the fabric of the buildings, it seemed natural to assume the persona of caretaker.
I heard that one of the routine tasks for the artist community was meant to be keeping the school yard in order by weeding, so I was thinking about weeds, contradictory attitudes to them both as markers of unacceptable untidiness and as valued signs of natural regeneration within an inner city environment.
There seemed a connection here with the earlier project, A Private Land, about the ruined psychiatric hospital in Talgarth, whose carpark, covered in brambles and tarmac concealed 1000 unmarked graves. For that project I made shelters out of the brambles, and for the Rogue piece I made a headpiece out of weeds, which for me carried a multiplicity of meanings around ideas of wildness, order and containment (especially relevant in the context of a school), as well as representing the figure of a caretaker.
I was lucky enough to be invited to show the video from that project as a guest artist in Rogue Women 3, curated by Margaret Cahill and Jen Orpin. Being included in this exhibition was key to the residency – connecting past work to ongoing experimentation and feeling truly part of the artist community, if only for a short time.
This blog gives just a tiny summary of everything the residency offered in terms of relationships, Wales/Manchester connections, personal learning, but through 2025 I have been reviewing all the material gathered and creating new moving image work. This will be shown in exhibition at Elysium Gallery, Swansea in February 2026.
More to follow…
