Prospect Cottage was, and continues to be, a place that inspired artists, queer icons, and creative minds of all varieties. Through our residency programme, we are delighted to open the doors of Prospect Cottage as a space to think, reflect, make and create. Inspired and energised by Derek Jarman, Prospect Cottage and Dungeness.
We are thrilled to announce the creatives who will be part of our residency programme in 2024/25.
They include:
Louis Shankar (they/them)
Louis Shankar is a writer, editor, researcher, and teacher based in East London. Their work occupies the overlap between art history, queer theory and psychoanalysis, with a focus on artistic responses to HIV/AIDS. In 2024, they will be submitting their PhD thesis and starting work on their first book.
@lsshnkr
Mattie O'Callaghan (they/them)
Mattie is an ecological designer, curator, and writer exploring how we can live better together on our fragile planet. Working at the intersection of landscape architecture, art and ecology, their work is centred around questions of climate justice, materialities and queer ecologies. They’ve been previously commissioned by BBC Arts, Kew Gardens and Cambridge University. They have a MA in Curating from the Royal College of Art, are currently studying a MLA in Landscape Architecture and they recently received the Kew Gardens Young Environmental Leader Award.
@mattie.ocallaghan
Kiera Chapman (she/her)
I am a political ecologist. My writing practice explores the construction of plants as commodities, and the variegated ways in which the natural and the human become entangled in different cultures, histories, and scales of being. I am part of a collective of writers who produced Nature's Calendar: The British Year in 72 Seasons, a crowdsourced guide to small changes in the natural world over the course of the year. I will use my residency to deepen my understanding of the ways that Jarman uses plants in his writing, filmmaking, and gardening practice. My aim is to create a series of plant portraits that will trace the particular local ecologies of Dungeness and their human involvements in the present, and explore the ways in which these relationships will shift in future, in response to late capitalism, migration, climate change and biodiversity loss.
@drkierachapman
Ami Clarke (she/they)
I will be making a ‘reading’ of the garden and surrounding areas working across multi-media sensory devices. With an emphasis on sustainable ecologies in relation to the economy, from a decentred (posthuman) xeno-feminist, and cross-species perspective, in an attempt at ‘living with uncertainty’. I utilise Lynn Margulis’ thinking around symbiogenesis - my interest is how to shift perspectives to a microbial and molecular scale, where we finally understand that there is no ‘outside’ of environmental crisis. Rather than the neo-darwinian emphasis on the selfish gene, and genetic mutation being the place at which difference occurs, Margulis’ work points to how cells inflect DNA. That DNA is driven by its environment: the ceulluar activity around it, and how the full story doesn’t lie in the genome alone but the entire system. Mutations are both random and driven by biochemical processes. The environment is as important as the genetic constitution. We are 90% non-human DNA, a highly promiscuous DNA; an eco-system; a holobiont; a consortia of several organisms, living alongside many other organisms from our eye lashes to the bacteria in our gut. A queer hybridity from which emerges new life.
@amiima333
Dagie Brundert (she/her)
I was born in a small town in the middle of West Germany. Beautiful nature, but boring after a while I moved to Berlin and studied visual arts / experimental film. Fell in love with my super 8 camera (Nizo) in 1988. Since then I try to be a particle-finder, a wave-catcher and a good story-teller. I try to absorb weird beautiful things from this world. Chew them and spit them out again. And now I have become a specialist for ecologically developed films and photos.
http://www.dagiebrundert.de/ @dagie100
Jessi Gutch (she/her)
Jessi Gutch is a BIFA nominated writer, award winning director and BAFTA Elevate/BFI Insight producer. Living with incurable ovarian cancer, she proudly identifies as a disabled filmmaker and tells stories that sit between fact and fiction, between dream and reality. Her slate of short films have screened at international festivals such as London Film Festival, BFI Flare, British Shorts Berlin, and Edinburgh, with Until The Tide Creeps In taking home both Best Documentary and Best of Festival at Aesthetica 2022, and Blind as a Beat winning Best Experimental Film at the Women Over 50 Film Festival 2022 and a Semi Finalist prize at Reel Abilities Film Festival in New York. Jessi is currently in post-production on her debut documentary feature Border Town and in development on her debut narrative feature My Cells are Trying to Kill Me.
@jessi_gutch
Harry MacQueen (he/him)
Harry is an actor and filmmaker from Leicester. In 2015 he wrote, directed, produced and starred in the micro-budget Hinterland, which was released in the UK by Curzon Cinemas. It was nominated for several awards including ‘Best Debut Film’ at the Beijing International Film Festival. His second feature as a writer/director, Supernova, starred Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci. It was produced by Emily Morgan and Tristan Goligher with backing from BBC Films and BFI. It was short-listed for ‘Best Film’ at the European Film Awards in 2021 and voted one of the ‘Best British Films of the 21st Century’ by critics in 2022. He is currently in development on several feature film and TV projects.
Davide Pepe
Davide Pepe was born in Puglia, in Ceglie Messapica in 1970 and he lives and works in Bologna. Since 1995, Davide Pepe has been developing, filming and producing artistic short films, dance videos, film installations, and experimental photography. He also works as editor, compositor, sound designer and, since 2016, he teaches video editing at the fine arts academy of Bologna.
Over the past 16 years his artistic path has evolved around the possibility of visualizing the physical concept of spacetime continuum. He also collaborate with other important avant-garde artists and musicians like Diamanda Galás, David Tibet (Current 93) and Steven Stapleton (Nurse with Wound).
@davidepepe93
Lynda Laird (she/her)
Lynda Laird is a photographic artist. Her research-based practice merges archive, photography, video and sound. Employing techniques, methods and materials that are sympathetic and relevant to the subject. She focuses on long-term bodies of work: primarily looking at landscape and the traces of memory in these spaces. Lynda is interested in exploring ways of showing what is invisible to the naked eye, often employing camera-less techniques and working with the materiality of specific landscapes in an attempt to bring an element or trace of its history into the work.
@_lyndalaird
Rob Curry (he/him)
Rob is a documentary director whose work explores living tradition in the UK. Often working in partnership with actor and director Tim Plester, his work his films have been broadcast and theatrically released in the UK and internationally, and played festivals including Rotterdam, SXSW. BFI London, Sheffield Doc/Fest and CPH:DOX.
https://www.fifthcolumn.org.uk
Louisa Chenciner (she/her)
I am a medical doctor, now specialising in public health. I work on issues relating to social protection, syndemics, and climate health. I am also a committed and creative gardener; I take pride in arranging and displaying flowers and plants that I have grown. I have gardened through grief. The grief comes and goes, but the gardening never stops. There is a tenderness to gardening and a sense of time being held. Gardens (or places things have decided to grow) have offered me relief throughout my work. There were the hot courtyards of the cottage hospital heaving with buddleia and bees. There was the shady, mysterious garden of the HIV unit with matted jasmine, creeping thistle and dandelions. The dense overgrown privet, briar rose and scorched grass by the ambulance drop-off.
Nikta Mohammadi (she/her)
Nikta Mohammadi is an Iranian artist and filmmaker based in Yorkshire. Her practice is rooted in her dreams. It examines the relationship between personal and political, private and public, documentary and fiction. She has explored themes of displacement and loss with a playful approach to how language is constructed and used in her work. Her latest project, Memory Stone, is a film installation exploring dreams and migration within the context of British rural landscape. She engages with non-western approaches towards landscape, where it’s not just a backdrop for human stories, rather a living creature with agency and intentions. Interested in the ghostly imprints migrants make on foreign lands, Mohammadi investigates migrants' psychological and physical relationship with land.
@nik_la_flaneuse
Keith Jarrett (he/him)
Keith Jarrett is a writer, performer and academic. His work explores Black history, religion and sexuality and has been widely anthologised. He has appeared on the BAFTA-winning show Life & Rhymes, and in documentaries. Keith was selected for the International Literary Showcase as one of 10 outstanding LGBT UK-based writers. He teaches at NYU in London.
Tim Brunsden (he/him)
I’m a freelance artist from Liverpool who is passionate about social issues. I create art that empowers community voices, often focusing on the themes that are impacting coastal communities. I use a mix of video, photography, installations, and live performances to provide a platform for diverse narratives and conversations.
@tim_brunsden www.light-factory.co.uk
We received an incredible response to the advertisement, our residency programme and research & development days are now full for 2024.
More information on Prospect Cottage can be found here.
We would like to thank The Linbury Trust for their support #LinburyTrustSupported
