ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE 2025

Martina O’Brien

Martina O’Brien research-led practice explores links between people, nature and technology, bound by an interest in perceptions of time and the earth sciences. Her projects are typically developed through conversations and engagement with communities of interest, including community-based organisations, citizen scientists, academics and members of the scientific community. She realises her ideas through various media including moving image, installation and printmaking and mainly presents her work in galleries in the form of exhibitions, at video screening events, and through giving public artist talks.
Over several years her work has examined technologies of meteorological measure from weather recording to climate modelling. Through these explorations, she considers how computational ways of seeing affect our possibilities for being, acting and thinking in the world.
More recently, her work has responded to industrial and scientific practices that are transforming our relationships with the ocean, from the extraction of the seabed through deep sea mining, to research into the effects of climate change on deep-water corals.

martinaobrien.com

Drawing on her time on many marine expeditions in the Atlantic Ocean, in Oslofjord and the Arctic Ocean, she has sought to map, understand, and vision these ecosystems. By exploring ideas of remoteness, technologized vision and unbreachable distance in relation to the seafloor, her work has attempted to reorient extractive imaginaries of ocean ecosystems, and attune to networked oceanic knowledges and communities – and their unfathomable elements – amongst the unfolding of climatological emergency.

Micheal Pittman

Michael Pittman was born in Newfoundland and Labrador to parents of mixed Indigenous/settler descent. He has a BFA from Memorial University, and a practice led master’s degree from the Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland. He has participated in multiple residencies, including Fogo Island Arts (2010), and was a semi-finalist for the prestigious Sobey Art Award (2013). He has exhibited at The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery (2012), the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, and the Benetton Foundation’s Great and North exhibition during the 2017 Venice Biennale. In 2021, he participated in the Bonavista Biennale, where his work was featured alongside the most exciting names in contemporary art.

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He is a prolific creator and is represented in public collections and multiple commercial galleries. Pittman has received numerous grants and awards for his art, which frequently references the physical environment, traditional knowledge and hidden histories of the places to which he is connected.

Percy Nii Nortey

Percy Nii Nortey is a multidisciplinary artist born and based in Kumasi, Ghana. His work explores themes of identity, materiality, memory, and labor blurring the lines between installation, performative objects and moving sculptures. Deeply rooted in his personal history and the socio-economic conditions of Ghana, Nortey’s practice seeks to decolonize minds, empower Black communities, and reclaim agency over their narratives.
Community engagement is central to his artistic approach, as he actively involves local people in the creative process. Through projects that repurpose second-hand fabrics— distributing them, collecting them after use, and transforming them into artworks—he highlights the significance of labor and its role in society.
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His work has been featured in major cultural events such as the Dekoloniale in Berlin, Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, Chale Wote Art Festival in Accra, and the Museum of Science and Technology in Accra. He has participated in residencies at the Dekoloniale Festival in Germany, Saari Residence in Finland, and perfocraZe International Artist Residency in Ghana.

Trond Ansten

Trond Anstenis based in Tromsø, Northern-Norway. He has a background as a woodcarver, biologist and trapper man and is educated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art and the University of Telemark. The harvest and processing of organic material from the wild is central to his work, where Ansten explores aspects of our relation to nature and the resource base. He works with sculpture, film and relational projects where material knowledge, cultural rituals and craft techniques are central. Recent projects explore architecture for microorganisms in wooden sculptures, seaweed-brewing and farming, trapping architecture, the potential of slaughter waste from the fisheries and the bar as an artistic site. The audience is invited on a journey through science, history and mysticism.

During his residency Ansten is most interested in getting to know the locals and the nature in the north of Ireland. If you are a scientist, a craftsman, an archeologist or a fisherman, out of passion or profession, or if you are doing some kind of harvest from nature to sustain yourself he will like to meet you. What is there of forgotten knowledge that can open up new potential?

www.trondansten.com

Ansten received the Norwegian Governments working grant in 2018 and his work is exhibited at galleries and art festivals such as North Norwegian Art Centre (Lofoten), Barents Spektakel (NO), CCA gallery (Glasgow), Sami Centre for Contemporary Art (NO), Bergen Kunsthall (NO), Satellite Art Show/Art Basel – Miami, Lofoten International Art Festival (NO), Nordic Art Week-Estonia, The Arctic Arts Festival (NO), Museum Kunst der Westküste (DE), Northern Norway Art Museum, Delai Film-festival (Moscow), Alternative Film Festival (Belgrade), Grace Exhibition Space (NYC) and Tokyo Photographic Art Museum.

Mary O’Malley

Mary O’Malley is an American-born ceramic artist based between Long Island, New York and London, England. She first gained recognition in the U.S. with her Bottom Feeder series, featured in exhibitions with the American Craft Council, the Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show, and a solo show at The Clay Studio in Philadelphia. In 2016, she completed an MA in Ceramics and Glass at the Royal College of Art and went on to co-found the artist collective Collective Matter. Their most notable project was a six-month Tate Exchange residency at Tate Modern in 2017.

O’Malley has held international residencies, including at the Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute in China and the Hambidge Center in Georgia. She is a two-time recipient of the American Craft Council’s Award of Excellence. Her work has been exhibited widely and is held in private and institutional collections, including the Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. She is currently represented by Taste Contemporary.

Mary’s ceramic practice explores the intersection of materiality, history, and identity, often appropriating historic decorative forms and re-contextualizing them through contemporary socio-political narratives. During her month-long residency at Artlink, she will develop new work responding to the architecture and landscape of Fort Dunree, focusing on bricks as enduring symbols of colonialism and human intervention in nature.

Her project will investigate the layered colonial histories of Inishowen, connecting Fort Dunree’s British military origins with broader narratives of Irish migration and settlement in the American South. O’Malley draws parallels between Irish immigrants’ roles in U.S. power structures and the transatlantic legacy of British and Irish colonialism, including connections to the plantation economy and cultural markers like the song Amazing Grace.

O’Malley will incorporate ceramic materials, brick clay, and water imagery to reflect the tension between permanence and transformation. The wild coastal environment of Dunree – its churning waters and persistent winds – becomes both subject and metaphor.