Selected for this year’s Studio Faire Student Residency Award are three fantastic artists, all studying for an MFA Arts & Humanities at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee, Scotland. Leena Nammari, Louise Ritchie and Paola McClure will be visiting us for a one week mini residency from 31st March, during their Easter break from their studies. They will in fact be Studio Faire’s very first Artists in Residence and we are extremely proud to be launching our business with artists of such caliber!

 

Introducing Leena Nammari, Louise Ritchie and Paola McClure:

Leena Nammari SSA

Leena is a Palestinian artist living in Scotland. She studied and worked as a nurse for a number of years, then abandoned her nursing career to study Fine Art Printmaking in Duncan of Jordanstone in Dundee, and continues to practice printmaking as her chosen image making process. She worked as a printmaking technician, studio manager/co-ordinator, master printer and printmaking educator at Edinburgh Printmakers Workshop.

She has exhibited within Scotland, Europe and elsewhere, as part of group exhibitions and had a number of solo exhibitions. She works predominantly in photography and printmaking, where she tries to push the boundaries of both, a push and pull, creating a tension that is palpable. Using alternative methods and subtle variations within both processes to achieve complex yet seemingly simple images on paper and cloth.

Her work is subtly loaded with politics, politics of the majority and politics of the personal. As all Palestinians, she has had her fair share of personal brushes with the occupation, whether personally having grown up there, through frequent visits home.

Her images have something amiss in them, a sadness, an abandonment, a loss, something lacking, wrong, unclear, allowing a little pause in the viewer, a thought, a slight abstraction and a flight of fancy. She does not try to preach, but to subtly prod and poke at the viewer, the observer, trying in in her own way to make the viewer take in what they see, question, and see the beauty within the image, catching their breath.

www.leenanammari.co.uk

Louise Ritchie, Artist in Residence at Studio FaireLouise Ritchie PPSSA

Louise Ritchie is an artist, lecturer and creative facilitator working in independent and collaborative contexts, embracing many processes and experimental pathways. This tangential exploration seeks to articulate the process of creativity curiosity. Multi faceted, contrary fascinations sweep broadly and loosely with a range of media spanning public art commissions, collaborations, performative and lens based works, to large format spatially situated paint-forms. Each seek to encapsulate vivid gestural energy down to various levels of detail whether this is for a co-designed public art work, large complex painterly studies or the controlled micro levels within needle-point and pounce studies on paper.

Louise is a graduate of DJCAD and a lecturer on the BA (Hons) Contemporary Art Practice Programme at City of Glasgow College. Louise is a former President of the Society of Scottish Artists and has won several major awards most recently the Dundee Visual Artist Award 2015. Exhibiting widely in the UK and abroad including London, Bulgaria, China, Belgium and France as well as curatorial projects in Slovakia, Louise has work in several major collections including The Mirror Group, London and Dundee City Council.

louiseritchie.com

Paola McClure, Artist in Residence at Studio FairePaola McClure SSA

Paola McClure’s current work stands at a juncture and is in that good old artistic place, the state of flux. As a long time practitioner of soft sculpture she took a recent decision to step away from her existing methodology to explore the use of new materials and processes. The decision to abandon an existing practice can be an initially exposing process but it is also a liberating one that must be embraced and, while the character of the work may change, the essential core and threads of connectivity remain the same.

Studying on the Masters programme has allowed her to explore new techniques such as digital design and 3D print as well as mould making, metal casting and wood construction, and continue the development of the inter-play between hard and soft surfaces, creating conversations not only between the elements within a sculpture but also between the form and its surrounding environment. As she explores these new materials and her work moves towards something more abstractly figurative she continues to examine themes that look at alienation, worlds out-of-kilter and the absurdities of life’s unexpected occurrences.

paolamcclure.com (under construction)

Plans for the Residency

During her residency at Studio Faire, Leena Nammari will take some time to reflect on her personal MFA program and consolidate some of her ideas. She will also be using the sunshine and cyanotype chemicals for experimentation. Louise Ritchie is exploring the Philosophy of Music within her humanities studies and will use this week to fully engage and challenge herself in that area through drawing, painting and taking the first steps towards learning the guitar. Paola McClure will be concentrating on exploring responses to the surrounding environment of Studio Faire through drawing and also creating forms from found materials that may be photographed in the round in order to be digitally reproduced as sculptural objects on her return to Scotland.

We look forward to seeing their developments and sharing some stories and images with you during their stay.

Would you be interested in booking a residency at Studio Faire? Prices start from just 320€.