ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE

Newfoundland Residency 2024

This is an Open Call for Irish artists to participate in the International Atlantic Art Exchange hosted by O’Brien Farm, Newfoundland. It invites visual artists from the northwest of Ireland to apply for a paid residency lasting 4 weeks from June to September 2024. The selected artists will receive a fee of €5000. They are expected to actively create in the studio, engage with the local community, and contribute to the O’Brien Farm program. The application deadline is April 23, 2024, and selections will be made based on criteria such as artistic commitment, proposal quality, and engagement with the local arts community.

Neva Elliott is a Dublin-based artist and writer with an MA from Central Saint Martin’s, London. She has exhibited throughout Ireland and internationally, including the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow, The National Gallery of Ireland, and The South African National Gallery. After a decade as CEO of Crash Ensemble, Ireland’s leading contemporary music group, Elliott returned to her art practice full-time in 2021.

Highlights from 2023 include her solo exhibition, How to create a fallstreak, at Linenhall Arts Centre, being an invited artist at the 193rd RHA Annual Exhibition and showing at ARTWORKS 2023 Remembering The Future at VISUAL Carlow, where she secured an award for ‘outstanding work’.

VISUAL Carlow also commissioned an excerpt from her memoir writing, which can be read at visualcarlow.ie/art-ideas. Other writing has been featured in literary journals, art and photography publications, and as exhibition texts, including Banshee, Unapologetic Magazine, Visual Artists Newsheet and Source Photographic Review, where it earned runner-up in Source’s New Writing Prize for 2023.

Elliott is an Irish Hospice Foundation signature artist.

Looking ahead, her solo exhibition, Notes on Being Human: A Year of Making, is scheduled for September
2024 at PALLAS Projects and Studios, Dublin and a two-person show at the Courthouse Gallery, Co. Clare, in 2025.

Neva Elliott creates work based on and in her life, not just narratively or anecdotally, but through extrapolating action from the awareness of the fragile and contingent nature of being human.

Projects come from a place of transparent vulnerability, saying the hard, uncomfortable things fundamental to being human. Individual works are formed through living as material, processing recollections and psychological states into action and tangible manifestation. Utilising herself as content and medium, a non- fictional performer in a lyrical conceptualism that blurs art and life.

Elliott’s recent body of work and solo show at the Linenhall Arts Centre in 2023 focused on grief centring on the artist’s loss of her husband, Colin, to cancer. Her forthcoming 2024 solo show at PALLAS will focus on post-traumatic healing and the ‘work’ everyone must do around difficult human emotions.

While on residency at Artlinks Fort Dunree, she will be working from biographical notes from the loss of her husband, whose family hails from Donegal. Creating work from and about her healing journey through lived experience – using her practice as a personal transformative process and vice versa. With works emerging as a product and communication from this experience, across textiles, ceramics, photography, text, performative action, voice, sculpture, and drawing.

While rooted in her personal biography, she aims to expand beyond individual memoir to speak to audiences honestly about aspects of our shared humanity that still hold some taboos – death, grief, and mental health.
“I use my practice to traverse the world, my relationships and the difficulties of being human. For me, it’s a means to work through grief, somewhere to place love for those who have gone, a way back to myself. It is a survival strategy baked into the act of making; an offering to my anguish and anxiety, a petition to ease it, a prayer in reverse.”

Image credit Devadeep Gupta

“As an artist navigating a multidimensional terrain, my creative exploration converges across installation, textiles, drawing, painting, film, publication, performance, and culinary arts. Rooted in collective experiences, my works serve as catalysts for dialogue, inviting reflections on contentious histories and their contemporary relevance.

My collaborative practice engages diverse communities, individuals, and institutions in India and Germany. Resulting in collective experiences shared through talks, lectures, performances, or workshops, my works aim to bridge perspectives. Through social engagements, urban and rural design interventions, expansive murals, lecture performances, and culinary sessions, I delve into narratives of resistance, disobedience, and marginalization. These narratives echo within contemporary society, serving as a lens to examine their impact on our collective existence.

This multidisciplinary journey seeks to unravel the intricate layers of human narratives, fostering connections and understanding amidst complexities, transitions, and adaptations in the face of adversity.”

The Whispering Sea

In the whispers of history and the echoes of my lineage, I find myself rooted in the narrative of migration that spans generations. Born and raised in the tranquil village of Bally, West Bengal, I am an heir to a legacy shaped by the turmoil of the Indian subcontinent’s partition in 1947. My family’s journey began in the bustling port city of Chittagong, where my grandparents, like countless others, embarked on a journey of survival and resilience.
The upheaval of partition compelled my ancestors to seek refuge, leaving behind the familiar shores of Chittagong for the uncertain embrace of Mumbai. Their tales, woven with threads of displacement and fortitude, have resonated through the passages of time, imprinting upon me a profound connection to the rhythms of migration and the cadence of the sea.

Growing up in Bally, the whispers of the Indian Ocean danced through the stories passed down by generations. The ocean, a witness to the collective memories and narratives of my family’s exodus, became an intrinsic part of myself—a silent witness to the legacy of movement and adaptation.

Now, in the context of this residency at Artlink, I yearn to forge an artistic dialogue between the Indian Ocean’s melodic history and the vast expanse of the Atlantic. This opportunity serves as a poetic juncture to weave the threads of my heritage with the broader tapestry of global migrations.

My artistic endeavour aims to illuminate the intricate parallels between the migration of waters and the human odyssey. It’s an exploration that transcends geographical boundaries, seeking to decipher whether the essence of migration resides solely within human vessels or if the oceans themselves, in their rhythmic tides and currents, carry echoes of movement and displacement.

Through the vessel of art, I endeavour to distil the essence of these migrations into tangible expressions that evoke emotions, provoke contemplation, and foster connections across oceans and histories.

Through various mediums encompassing murals, installation, multimedia and culinary practices, I aim to encapsulate the essence of migration, translating the intangible emotions into a tangible space of contemplation, courage, embracement and most importantly imagination.

In interacting with Artlink’s program, I intend to contribute actively to the local artistic community. Through open studio sessions, workshops, talks, and cooking sessions I aim to share my artistic journey and insights, fostering dialogues that intertwine the global narrative with the local tapestry.

This residency at Artlink stands as an intersection where my narrative converges with the grandeur of the oceans’ tales, and I am eager to embark on this immersive artistic journey—a testament to the resilience, love, adaptability, and endurance inherent in the human spirit amidst the currents of change, pain and hostility.