ARTISTS TALKING

Residencies aim to give artists time to focus and to develop their practice, suggesting space for personal creative exploration and experimentation and offering artists profiling and career development. Clearly though, the sponsors and programmers providing them tend to expect something in return for providing artists with fees and also studio space, accommodation and a production budget.

Interface with the public in some form or another is an inherent part of many residencies. Whilst some residencies expect artists to hold workshops, talks or open studio events alongside doing their own work, others may have a lighter touch.

Gallery residencies

The prestigious Momart Fellowship at Tate Liverpool gives artists a fee along with a large studio and access to the gallery's substantial facilities and archives. Although artists don't have to produce new work, they do have to give a talk at John Moore's University, Liverpool and occasionally hold an 'open studio' for the public.

Paul Rooney, Momart Fellow in 2002 found: "the main advantage was that I could evaluate the work I had done over the last year and consider my next steps. Being at Tate Liverpool offered important networking opportunities and possibilities of collaborating with other artists and staff".

Although the level of financial reward for the Kettle's Yard fellowship is higher – and encompasses studio and accommodation at a Cambridge college for the academic year – competition for it is high. Usually the fellowship holder is fairly established and will already have some career success.

Emerging artists would probably be better off applying for opportunities like the Marlborough College residency where a prerequisite is the ability to communicate well with teenagers. Here, the benefits include a £4,500 fee, small materials budget, accommodation plus meals during term time and access to art department facilities.

For Harriet Marman, this residency has been a great starting point for her career: "I've had the benefit of time to try out and learn new things. My work deals with institutions and repetitive behaviour – I have learned as much from the students as they have from me."

Space to work

Access to affordable studio space is high on the wish list of many artists. Florence Trust had this in mind when setting up a programme of one-year studio residencies for twelve artists in a decommissioned Victorian church in London.

Here, artists pay a small studio rent in exchange for freedom to develop their work, access to tutorials and marketing and fundraising advice and visibility through exhibitions.

Delfina Studio Trust goes a step further and provides twelve rent-free studios as one and two-year residencies for UK and international artists, with the latter getting some accommodation too. Resident artists tend to be a few years out of college with substantial exhibition experience.

Danny Rolph who did a two-year residency at Delfina said: "My work gradually developed during this important period between being a student and a professional artist".

Although the artists finance materials and living costs, advantages of being at Delfina include access to equipment and resources and absolutely no pressure at all to produce 'an end product'.

Across the UK

But it's not just in London that residencies are available. And to keep ahead, artists have to research the background to the range of opportunities happening across the UK, to find the right ones for them.

Residencies are found at Spike Island, the artist-led studio complex in Bristol, in Durham where chosen artists get use of an extraordinary studio space nestling under the cathedral and in rural Cumbria where the rolling programme of opportunities at Grizedale is by no means exclusive to artists working with landscape or environmental issues.

This revitalised organisation looks nowadays for "fresh ideas and new modes of engagement", taking a curatorial approach to select from artists' proposals and create a coherent programme.

Europe

Well-established residency opportunities in mainland Europe, such as those offered by the British School at Rome are much sought-after. Roxy Walsh, recipient in 2000 of the Abbey Award in Painting, found the prospect of three-months funded leave from her full-time teaching post to concentrate her own practice "unimaginably luxurious".

Danny Rolph's residency at Delfina gave him a new confidence and knowledge that feels led him to become an Abbey Scholar at the British School at Rome at a pivotal period in his artistic development".

Colin Andrews similarly emerged from an EMARE residency in Hungary "having conducted a thorough and timely re-evaluation of my own practice. This research was subsequently used to produce several other works. I have maintained contact with a number of those I met and I was later invited to do another residency."

Künstlerhaus Schloß Balmoral is one of several similar international residency centres in Germany. Often located outside of the main urban areas, the emphasis is on creative and intellectual exchange between residents with a more open-ended expectation as to the final outcome of residencies. The director of Schloß Balmoral offered John Plowman a residency there as a result of an introduction by the Usher Gallery, Lincoln where he'd had an exhibition.

This one-month residency funded by German regional government gave him: "An opportunity to make a piece of work I had had in mind for some time and needed a concentrated period of sustained activity to realise".

International perspectives

As the artists featured on this site show, international residencies are often a stepping stone toward developing new networks, exhibitions at home and abroad, as well providers of much-needed periods of contemplation and re-assessment. The value of immersion in different cultural contexts should not be underestimated.

As Belfast artist Susan MacWilliam commented about her time at Trinidad's Caribbean Contemporary Arts: "For me, the cultural experience of being somewhere else was as important as making work. It was very interesting in terms of widening my perspective and meeting people from different backgrounds."

For Simon Collison:

"The main goals for my residency at Straumur Art Commune in Iceland were to concentrate purely on my work, meet artists, and get to see and understand as much about the country as possible. I was able to find new directions for my work. As the work made there was exhibited nationally, it gave a new dimension to my existing work. I felt much more confident about being an artist."

Impact

A significant aspect of any residency, whether at home or abroad, is its lasting impact. This can range from a substantial shift in an artist's work or the direction of their practice, a crucial introduction to an influential curator, or invitations to spend time or exhibit in other places.

Graham Ramsay's sojourn in Australia funded by the British Council and Glasgow City Council, had an impact of rather a different kind: "Impressed by the quality of food in Melbourne I set out to get as fat as possible, gaining about twenty-five pounds in two months. Documentation of this process was shown in my exhibition, 'Beer + Cheeseburger + Ice Cream ÷ Spaghetti x Chips = Graham Ramsay', at the completion of my residency. In addition to some lingering fatty deposits, the residency has resulted in interest in my work from art magazines".