Residency program
Residencies are open to both national and international artists. Each year they may take a slightly different form but often have an environmental and socially engaged focus.
We believe in building a space for collaboration, experimentation and failure.
Vandria Borari in residence 2023
Ben demonstrating using Lidar in the forest
Current Residency Opportunities
Our 2025 Rotherham Artist Residency is now closed, future opportunities will be posted here and across our socials.
Past Residencies
Uzma Rani
Rotherham, UK
Uzma Rani is a multidisciplinary artist, her practice is rooted in co-creation and cultural heritage. Her work evolves in the spaces between memory and conversation, weaving colour, calligraphy, and community into living stories that travel between cultures and generations. She combines abstract impressionism and multilingual calligraphy with research and participatory methods, creating work that is both visually expressive and socially engaged.
She will be working with us Autumn-Winter 2025 with a focus on early-stage creative research while engaging with Rotherham’s cultural context. Exploring multiple creative outputs with access to the laser cutter, sound equipment, and digital tools, to develop new ways of translating archival stories and calligraphic forms into immersive, multi-sensory works.
Maison Trampoline
London, UK
Maison Trampoline is the name of the collaborative work of visual artist John Walter and extra-disciplinary researcher Alejandro Luna, which began in late 2023. Their mission is “To raise awareness of complex subjects using provocative and playful hybrid approaches”. Maison Trampoline is interested in breaking boundaries by questioning existing taxonomies. We create hybrids and mutants. We queer disciplines by switching their codes, and by inverting the hierarchies of “expert” and “amateur”. Outputs can take a myriad of forms, including (but not limited to) material objects, academic written papers, fashion shows, biological prototypes, artist’s moving images, talks, events, and exhibitions.
During their time working alongside us in the Bio Arts Lab at the YSP studio they are looking to explore tiny forests, microorganisms, and fresco techniques, dancing between the intersection of biodesign and visual art.
Vandria Borari
Borari Alter do Chão, Amazonia
Vandria is an indigenous woman from Alter do Chão, in the Lower Tapajós region of the Amazon. She is an activist and ceramic artist, with a bachelor’s degree in law from the Federal University of Western Pará. She is part of the indigenous women’s collective “As Karuana” and a member of the Kuximawara Association of indigenous women artists and craftswomen from Alter do Chão.
Vandria joined us September-October 2023 for a residency to create work for our This is a Forest exhibition as part of Leeds 2023. She created a number of large ceramic pieces which were then fired by our neighbours Clay Yorkshire.
The works, Yupirungáwa features tucumâ and curuá seeds in ceramic, sculpted in large scale to transport us to the botanical remains found during excavations in the archaeological sites of Porto Santarém, in the town of Santarém, and of Caverna da Pedra Pintada, in Monte Alegre, both in the state of Pará, in the Brazilian Amazon region.
Henry Cottam
Scunthorpe/Leeds, UK
Henry is a visual artist working across sculpture, moving image and print making. For the past four years he has been developing a project exploring Scunthorpe and Redcar’s steel industries and histories. He develops new ways of experiencing and preserving this industry’s unique history through methods of documentation, excavation, archiving and material investigation.
He spent his residency exploring and interrogating various different methods of scanning and capture to develop his work further. From trips into the park with the LiDAR, developing various bits of footage from site, exploring sound recording, scanning found objects with the artec micro scanner and exploring creative outputs through the workshop, and CNC.
HanFei
Yorkshire, UK
Hanfei are an Art Collective Group. Their main practice is in Kinetic Art and sculptures. Their work connects and combines Kinetic Art with early/ historic mechanics often influenced by traditional inventions that they have modernised and reinvented, primarily through metal and wood craftsmanship.
The aim of their work is to provoke audiences of varying ages to transcend back in time to child-like playfulness and curiosity. Interaction from their audience is a key element of their work therefore they try to create pieces that initially capture their attention, through the atheistic (how it looks), kinetics (the movement) and mechanics (how it moves), which creates engagement. The pleasure they experience in exhibiting their work simply comes being able to make people smile through stimulating curiosity and reminiscing childhood memories.
Tala Lee-Turton
Barnsley, UK
Tala Lee-Turton is a creative producer, dance and visual artist, graduate of the Bolshoi Ballet Academy, Moscow, and founder of her own production company. Spanning live performance, visual art, film and creative research, her work explores the spaces where social realities and the imagination converge, often informed by her civic role as an intersectional Barnsley artist. Tala’s productions are supported by the Barbican, Arts Council England, Northern Ballet, Sheffield Theatres, BalletBoyz, Dance East, The Abderrahim Crickmay Charitable Settlement, Screen Yorkshire, Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council, the Genesis Foundation and Barnsley Civic.
Osmose Lab
Retford, UK
Aurelie and Ashley are the founders of Osmose an interdisciplinary design studio focused on regenerative circularity and sustainability, and Mykko an award winning mycelium leather company.
Their practice centres on pushing the boundaries of traditional crafts such as wood work and botanical dyes, maintaining transparency in the design process and only making use of organic/ethically sourced materials. Committed to countering generically wasteful trends, Aurelie and Ashley advocate for a symbiotic lifestyle. In addition to living harmoniously, they want to push the boundaries on what can be achieved with pure, natural resources.
During their residency they will also be collaborating and consulting on the completion of the bio lab in our studio. Alongside exploring ideas for the development of the studio garden from the perspective of it as a materials resource.
Bhavani Esapathi
Newcastle, UK
Bhavani or ‘B’ is a writer, maker & social-tech activist working in the intersections of art, health sciences & digital technology. Much of her work shed light on hidden institutional practices which affect minority communities, those with chronic or invisible health conditions and [im]migrants . She also founded The Invisible Labs [theinvisiblelabs.com] which is a global hub for those who experience autoimmune diseases. Some of the organisations she has collaborated with include The British Council, The Royal Society for the Arts, Innovate UK, ACE, The Victoria & Albert Museum, The National Archives etc. Her invisible storytelling project won the WIRED Magazine’s ‘Creative Hack Award’ in the ‘most innovate idea as social response’ category in Tokyo, Japan.
As part of her residency at Invisible Flock, she is exploring ways to bring these three strands; access to adequate healthcare, migratory politics & climate action together in order visualise an inclusionary model to combat the current climate emergency.
Miia Kettunen
Rovaniemi, Finland
Miia is a Rovaniemi-based Finnish artist who has after several years of working as a freelance costume designer (MA), developed a diverse way of project-oriented working as a visual artist. Her works are often site-specific with the consideration for the environment and derivatives to questions on how the work can originate from and communicate with the surrounding community. Her artistic techniques are evolving and transforming with each project she works on as she places much importance on the initiative nature of the work and her communal role as an artist mediator.
In the Cost of Innovation residency she will study the subtle space and communication between human and nature and if the often missing sense of interconnectedness could be modulated into interconnecting points of coherence with the combined use of LiDAR technology and photography.
Caroline Sinders
Berlin, Germany
During her residency Caroline conducted workshops under the title of The Feminist Data Set. Designed to explore how data collection can be used as an artistic practice and a collaborative, community practice. Asking what does ethical and communal technology creation and consumption look like?
Caroline is a machine learning design researcher and artist. She is the founder of Convocation Design + Research, a design and research agency focusing on the intersections of machine learning, user research, designing for public good, and solving communication difficult problems. As a designer and researcher, she’s worked with groups like Amnesty International, Intel, IBM Watson, the Wikimedia Foundation as well as others. She is also a research fellow with Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and Policy. Caroline holds a master’s degree from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.
Irma Catherine Wange
Kampala, Uganda
Irma uses design to engage, empower and educate across canvas, through painting, photography, product design, and transportation design to communicate with space, aimed at discovering and solving design challenges in our surroundings. She has learned experience through working with different projects, such as the Kiira Ev project at Makerere University Centre for Research in Transportation.
Technologies (now known as Kiira Motors Uganda), which involved exploring green technology in electric vehicles for a period of one year (2012 – 2013) as an undergraduate research assistant. Irma gained more interest in design challenges such as, liking the design industry to design practice for sustainable product design development in Uganda (LID Project). This later gave birth to more and more projects including working with i-CMiiST on road safety using creative methods. This has helped her pursue her passion in their respective disciplines.
Akeelah Bertram
Leeds, UK
During her residency Akeelah explored new fabrication and prototyping techniques that have resulted in the development of a new installation exploring the diaspora experience titled Return. Return explores the idea of diaspora as physical, mental and social states of separation in the form of interactive portals connecting audiences in different spaces.
Akeelah is a visual artist who creates immersive environments out of light and sound. Inspired by phenomenology and structuralism, her work aims to situate audiences in unfamiliar environments to challenge physical and ideological perspectives. Akeelah studied Fine Art at the University of Leeds before going on to complete an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art. Over the last 10 years she has produced independent and collaborative works, exhibiting nationally and internationally.
