New season – new residents! Meet Marlaina Read (AU), Tara Langford (GB), Natalija Vujosevic (YU/ME), and a few we already know - Demelza Watts (GB), Katherina Heil (DE), and Cecilia Hultman (SE). 

Marlaina Read  (AU) studied Visual Communication and Media Arts at University of Arts in Berlin, Visual Art at University of Sydney, and Fine Art at University of New South Wales.

Her practice uses immersive and ephemeral site-specific installation, photography, sound and film. She is interested in exploring affect where industry, environment, and the human intersect. Her current practice explores the culture and histories found in folklore, place marking, labour and ritual.

At Nida Art Colony Marlaina will work on the project, which started with research drawn from Iceland, Canada, Scotland and Norway—countries which share topography, climate, maritime and migration histories. The artist is interested to contrast this with the unique sea-bound and forged area of the Curonian Spit and its fishing and maritime cultures and history. She will create an artwork responding to local maritime traditions, ghosts, and haunting.  

Tara Langford (GB) and Natalija Vujosevic  (YU-ME) met during their residency at Nida Art Colony in 2016 and now are coming back as an artist duo.

Tara Langford is an artist, designer, and lecturer living and working in London. She works across print, moving image, and installation. She explores the complexity and plurality of the relationship between image and language and its numerous possibilities of generating meaning, realities, and fictions. Tara is the course leader of BA Design for Art Direction at LCC of University of the Arts London.

Natalija Vujošević studied at Cetinje Art Academy, now lives and works in Montenegro. She produces installation, video, and art books. She is the co-editor of Trema press and the founder of the Institute for Contemporary Art of Montenegro.

At Nida Art Colony Tara and Natalija will design a collection of garments and designed sets inspired by the codified aesthetic forms of society constructed identities. Exploring the formation of subjectivities and identities in response to political, economic and social backdrops of both artists and their research interests builds on their skills and work in curating, art, fashion, and education. 

Demelza Watts (GB) (b. 1990) studied Sculpture at Wimbledon College of Art (BA) and Royal College of Art (MA) in London, where she currently lives and works.

Demelza is the project coordinator for PACTO international art collective and a co-founder of Pea Proposals public art research group. Her work is a dissection of the role that the comfort of our home plays in our everyday lives. She is interested in how does a dwelling provide us with the ground out of which we might be creative, political, social.

During the residency, Demelza will be exploring the role of the home in everyday life by dissecting ‘home comforts’ and considering senses of impermanence, public comforts, communal space, and challenge the everyday modalities of living. The artist is interested in excavating notions of ‘making roots’ and history, creating furnishings, establishing routines, investing in place and attempts to understand what it is to build a home for artists, for creative exploration, for communities, a home that investigates its own structure and its consequences.

Cecilia Hultman (SE) (b. 1985) received BA and MA in Fine Arts in Konstfack University of Fine Arts, Crafts, and Design.

Cecilia is working with the language, drawings and its relation to the space. She is putting a drawing into a complex composition where language, philosophy, space, and sculpture are coexisting. A goal for each drawing and project is to find the right gesture as well as the right partners when it comes to relating to objects, text fragments and compositions; things that can guide the artist and the audience to look upon lines, objects and physical arrangements as both playful and carefully arranged compositions, pieces, installations – with linguistic, symbolic, and poetic dimensions.

During her stay, Cecilia will work with a text, drawing and sculptural project, from the idea of bringing back paper to its very beginning, to see how pieces of wood can be combined and cooperating with its manufactured version. How the lines and the changeability are the same, even after the manufacturing, and how paper and wood in ‘sheets’ actually remain a familiarity, even though its appearance, its standard formats and purposes, turned out to be totally different.

Katherina Heil (DE) (b. 1982) graduated at the University of Applied Art and Design in Berlin, Germany (BA) and at the Master Institute of the AKV St. Joost in den Bosch in the Netherlands (MFA). Currently she lives and works in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

Working primarily with sculpture and installation, Katherina’s work always links to cosmic contexts and coherencies (macrocosm / microcosm). Touching on subjects such as nature representation, knowledge-production, and materials, her work arises from the desire to get in touch with what lies beyond our human perception. By striving to formalize depictions of phenomena that appear to us without form or only in abstract shapes, she attempts to sound out our physical perceptions that are indicated by an object. Working inside a realm of scientific facts vs. fiction makes her a narrator, opening different ways to interpretations, trying to motivate the viewer to uncover his own path through the multiple layers of the work.

During her residency at Nida Art Colony Katherina will work on her ongoing project Sensory Thresholds and will focus on the production of a series of drawings while playfully exploring scientific images and data in regards to the exploration of the universe and matter. Her residency at Nida Art Colony is supported by the CBK Rotterdam.