We are thrilled to launch our residency programme for 2023–24. This year’s programme reflects our mission to cultivate the freewheeling imagination and to support ideas and practices that shape the world. At the heart of this year’s residencies, commissions and youth programming is our thinking about how we can use our resources and unique site as equitably and ethically as possible, opening the organisation to wider audiences and bringing new voices into our programme. 

We are delighted to announce that in 2023-24 we will host artist residencies with Intoart (Clifton Wright, Nancy Clayton and Dawn Wilson), Rudy Loewe, Fiona MacDonald, Wet Mess, Bella Milroy, Joe Namy, Daniel Oduntan, Sean Roy Parker, Belladonna Paloma, Diana Puntar, Charwei Tsai and Murphy Yum. 

In recent years we have reviewed our use of open calls to consider approaches to programming that are less reliant on unpaid artist labour. Working with a network of advisors made up of Wysing alumni, we are making efforts to bring new voices into our programmes. Our 2023 Advisory Group includes Uma Breakdown, Cédric Fauq, Tammy Reynolds and Akil Scafe-Smith. 

Our 2023 residencies are supported by Arts Council England and many are organised in partnership: Charwei Tsai’s residency has been jointly invited with Kettle’s Yard and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in advance of the exhibition Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia and friends at Kettle’s Yard (11 November 2023-18 February 2024); Belladonna Paloma in partnership with Vital Capacities; Murphy Yum's residency is supported by Knotenpunkt, with additional support from Flat Time House. 

Biographies 

Intoart: Clifton Wright, Nancy Clayton, Dawn Wilson 

Intoart is a pioneering visual arts organisation championing its founding vision for ‘people with learning disabilities to be visible, equal & established artists and designers’.  

Intoart’s studio is located in the heart of Peckham and has been embedded within the communities of South London for the past 23 years. Founded in 2000, by Ella Ritchie and Sam Jones, the full time studio programme spans art, design & craft and is an alternative art school for people with learning disabilities to develop a long-term creative practice. 

Three artists from Intoart will be spending time at Wysing in 2023.  

Clifton Wright has pursued portraiture for over a decade, from the beginning the faces in his drawings have been woven into and enmeshed with tessellations of abstract shapes. Working most recently from life, his drawn portraits build as a series, made in response to family albums, art books and exhibitions, characters from science fiction, film, and popular culture.

https://intoart.org.uk/artist/clifton-wright/ 

Nancy Clayton’s large scale drawings are informed by her experience and observation of the body in motion. These complex figurative compositions balance the weight and momentary flight of the body while also capturing the emotional intensity shared through performance. 

https://intoart.org.uk/artist/nancy-clayton/ 

Dawn Wilson’s drawings of night life and street life in Kinshasa and Bamako were selected for New Contemporaries 2022 including exhibitions at Humber Street Gallery, Hull and South London Gallery. She is committed to monochrome and uses graphite, charcoal dust applied with a brush, white pencil, and an eraser. 

https://intoart.org.uk/artist/dawn-wilson/ 

Rudy Loewe (b. 1987) visualises Black histories and social politics through painting, drawing and text. They began a Techne funded practice-based PhD at the University of the Arts London in 2021, critiquing Britain’s role in suppressing Black Power organising in the English-speaking Caribbean, during the 60s and 70s. Loewe is creating paintings and drawings that unravel this history included in recently declassified Foreign & Commonwealth Office records. Their approach to painting speaks to their background in comics and illustration — combining text, image and sequential narrative.  

Fiona MacDonald works with human and nonhuman beings as Feral Practice to create art projects that develop ethical and imaginative connection across species boundaries. They work to expand relationality, explore diverse aesthetics and foreground distinctive creaturely subjectivities. Often people set up divisions between species, and between different categories of knowledge and understanding, Feral Practice works and converses across these barriers. Their vulnerable, speculative approach brings experimental art into spaces of care and attentiveness for and with real, situated beings.  

Wet Mess is a wet mess, horny for your confusion. Let it all out and guess again at the insecure balding white man/pussy prince/alien baby. Have a lollygag, think about your fantasy flesh suits, call me sweet prince, and remember Roger in a robe. Choose to make some silly campy decisions, with all the hairy thems and dykey men. Mainly thinking about cunnilingus cunni cunni lingus but also being more unknown than known. All I really wanna do is strip for the stripper and drive her home with the dogs. 

Bella Milroy is an artist and writer who lives in her hometown of Chesterfield, Derbyshire. She works responsively through mediums of sculpture, drawing, photography, text, writing and curating. She makes work about making work (and being disabled) and not being able to make work (and being disabled). This process-based practice is fundamental to her as a disabled artist. She is continually motivated by concepts of public and private spaces and where the sick and/or disabled body exists within them, themes which emerge throughout much of her work.  

Joe Namy is an artist, composer, and educator often working collaboratively through the intersections of sound, video, performance, and sculpture. Their projects often focus on the politics of music and organised sound, such as the pageantry and power of opera, the noise laws and gender dynamics of bass, the colors and tones of militarisation, the migration patterns of instruments and songs, and the complexities of translation in all this—from language to language, from score to sound, from drum to dance. Joe holds a monthly DJ residency called Rhythm x Rhythm on Radio Alhara, is a Sundance/Time Studios Kendeda fellow, the artist in residence for the London Borough of Barking & Dagenham, and a PHD researcher at the Ruskin School of Art at Oxford University. 

Daniel Oduntan is an interdisciplinary media artist conceptional occupying the spaces between visual arts, sound and performance media. Predominantly from a sound engineering background; graduating from the London College of Music & Media in 2007; from 2010 he began working in the visual arts and heritage sector. Nominated soon after for best British emerging artist by the Mica Gallery in 2012, and furthering his professional media experience as a multimedia assistant at the V&A Museum within their digital media and publishing department; leaving in 2019. His polymath approach to creativity has led him to explore in recent years; the politics of sound archives, the power of imagery, methods to accessibility and spatial justice. Daniel has been commissioned, produced cross-discipline art projects and workshop talks for the likes of; the V&A Museum, UCL Bartlett, The London College of Fashion, Warp Records, The Design Museum and Publicis London. 

Sean Roy Parker is a writer, cook, gardener and visual artist based at Michael House co-living project in Shipley, Derbyshire (UK). He practises slow, low-tech crafts and landwork using leftover consumer debris and natural abundances in anticipation of the post-capitalist transition, and is a self-taught fermentation enthusiast and soil builder. He redistributes matter through flexible care structures like labour exchange, favours, artswaps, community meals and teaching. In his ongoing project Fermental Health he writes essays about and leads workshops on the lifecycle of materials, complexities of interspecies responsibility, and problem-solving through collaborative action.  

Diana Puntar is a London based artist and educator originally from New York City. She is the 2022/23 Artist in Residence at Eltham College. Her cross-disciplinary work includes sculpture, installation, drawing, and printmaking.  

In Puntar’s current project, Historical Re-Anachronism, she seeks to understand the concurrent surge of right-wing ideology in both the UK and US through researching the Revolutionary War period. Rising nationalism on both sides of the Atlantic, whether the glorification of British imperialism or an exhortation of American patriotism have roots in the edited histories and propaganda of the English colonies in North America.  

Charwei Tsai graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in industrial design and art & architectural history (2002), and the postgraduate research program La Seine at L’École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris (2010). 

Highly personal yet universal concerns spur Tsai’s multi-media practice. Geographical, social, and spiritual motifs inform a body of work, which encourages viewer participation outside the confines of complacent contemplation. Preoccupied with the human/nature relationship, Tsai meditates on the complexities among cultural beliefs, spirituality, and transience.  

Vital Capacities: Belladonna Paloma

This May we will partner with Vital Capacities and Videotage Hong Kong to host Belladonna Paloma for a month-long online residency, running alongside the Both Sides Now 2023-24 programme. The Vital Capacities residency programme offers artists an opportunity to share artwork, have a platform, develop new connections, have meetings with curators and arts professionals, and to build a new network. Residencies are flexible, and can be built around artists’ commitments, enabling artists to create, add and participate according to their schedule. 

Belladonna Paloma is an artist, poet & witch living in Shetland, UK. She paints, hand pokes tattoos, writes poetry, and makes computer games. Her work is into listening to faeries, how divination disturbs linear time, grief rituals, toilets and necromancy. Recent projects and exhibitions include: The Well of Sickness Shimmering, a computer game made in collaboration with Uma Breakdown exploring the folklore of holy wells (launching Spring 2023); Bog-lore, exhibition at Gaada, Shetland (March 2023); DRIP, group show at Two Queens, Leicester (2022); Descent to Kilgrimol Rx, solo show at Abingdon Studios, Blackpool (2022); There’s Always Things Falling Out The Sky, a book-length poem about Bigfoot phenomena, made with Roxy Topia & Paddy Gould, published by Pink Sands Studio (2021). 

Murphy Yum was born in Seoul and grew up on the outskirts of Seoul in Korea. She currently works by coming and going between France and Korea.  

As a visual artist, she works with everyday objects and machines that have a plastic exterior and appear easy to handle, such as household articles with motors and electric cradles. She pays close attention to the relationship between objects and users and seeks to transform them into something new and unexpected by repairing, dismantling, and assembling them in various installations. Through this empirical method, she creates an illusionary space where care and negligence coexist.