Residencies 2022/23

The first round of Prospect Cottage Residences took place in 2022 and 2023. From over 300 applications nine successful artists, writers, filmmakers and creatives were selected. 

Scroll down for more information about the 2022/2023 residencies. 

Jarman Award winning artist, filmmaker and cultural activist Andrea Luka Zimmerman writes:

"I am currently making a new artists' film called Wayfaring Stranger (Summer 2023, Wapping Project) giving a heightened and sensory vision of a life embodied by seven women and non-binary people, each inhabiting one day and one night that represent a decade of experience."

"Poet-essayist Eileen Myles will speak the narration in the film, which was developed during our filming together. The other performers are: Eirini Ampatzi Ippikoglou, Michiko Oki, Mwiinga Twyman, Therese Henningsen, Tizzy-Rose and Xiaolu Guo.

We are only human if we are in and of the world, and one of the sections in Wayfaring Stranger does not feature human life, but the particular winter landscape around Prospect Cottage (a sequential conversation following Dungeness' appearance in my previous Artangel - produced film 'Here for Life'), especially the hares and owls that are night dwellers there, and the winter's night sea, which I will film.

To spend a week at Prospect Cottage offers me valuable thinking-and-being time, which is very rare for me, and extremely important, working in the way I do, including mentoring and social practice. Derek Jarman’s life and work - queer, engaged, working across media with regular collaborators in a non-hierarchical way and with low budgets - has been deeply inspirational in my way of working, along the beauty of collaborative and creative refusal of normative structures."

_{Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Work in Progress film still, Wayfaring Stranger, 2023}

Dr Kerry Ryan is a writer and the founder of Write like a Grrrl. While at Prospect Cottage, Kerry says:

“I will listen. I will listen then record: the power plant’s dying hum; waves wild then smooth, fizzing on the shingle; the willow warblers; the pied flycatchers; the fishing boats hauled in and out under lighthouse pulse. I’ll record the grockles– the tourists– as well as the locals: their thoughts, feelings, and language particular to the Marshes and Dungeness. I will create a cartography of sound, mapping and plotting tributaries and sites of sounds/speech/stories/history in a coastal area with rapidly changing demographics. At the project’s end, I’ll share my soundmap online, allowing public access and the opportunity to add field recordings.”

Writer Paweł Świerczek explains:

"I will spend my time at Prospect Cottage investigating the term “living with HIV” through the lenses of the holobiont theory and queer ecologies. I am interested in imagining and inventing the utopia of the symbiotic interspecies human-virus companionship. I will dig into the theme through somatic meditations and movement explorations in relationship to the Prospect Cottage and Dungeness – its space, nature, spirits, history, symbolism and queerness. I will explore the relationship between the human body, the virus and the outside environment in search for performative, ritualistic and healing potentials of these connections with hope to share it with the world afterwards."

Eleanor Penny, the award-winning poet and writer says:

“My work would be transformed by the opportunity for extensive onsite writing, particularly given my focus on the natural environment. Such research would not otherwise be feasible”.

British author, environmental activist and journalist Tamsin Omond writes:

"As I sweat it out in the early hours, a ‘guilty victim’ of the scourge, I want to bear witness how happy I am, and will be until the day I die, that I was part of the hated sexual revolution; and that I don’t regret a single step or encounter I made at that time.”
Derek Jarman, Modern Nature, p.141

"The summer I started on testosterone was the same I drove five times to Dungeness. I drew strength for my self-determination from a relationship I was creating with Derek Jarman. He was a revelation as I searched through history, charting constellations of people to whom I might belong. This charting of ancestry - both in blood lines and through a chosen chain of queer lineage - is something I have always done. It's how I hear encouragement to love my transness, even whilst mainstream narratives say over and over again that there is something wrong with me.

In Prospect Cottage at Dungeness I will be charting the threads of my ancestry, inherited and chosen, to understand the influences that have shaped me.  I will write about the intimate bonds we create with our dead, those we consider our ancestors, and how I give myself permission - with the courage of my ancestors - to live proudly.

Especially I will be writing a thread of memoir inspired by Derek Jarman and the strength of his decision to create at Dungeness."

Researcher and artist Jason Molloy explains:

"As a Sussex resident, my work uses Prima Materia collected from the ever-conjuring coastline, metals, and minerals beyond their limited ‘productive life cycles’. This residency will provide me with the precious opportunity of having space around my ideas and time unpacking my process of making. I'm particularly intrigued by the relationship between the landscape and history of Dungeness, how at a casual glance it would appear as a vast expanding horizon but on closer inspection it opens revealing itself as an undulating terrain punctuated with tenacious Ruins wrapped in the tendrils of sea kale.

I’d like to spend my time at Prospect Cottage researching a way to capture this feeling of the confluence between the past and future. I’m not sure exactly what form this will take as I’m quietly confident the space will guide me, although as with all things it will begin with a sketch that will slowly become paintings or sculptures. It’s such a unique and rare privilege that it would be easy to be subsumed by wild expectations. I intend to enjoy its simpler everyday truth as well, like its famous sunrises and sunsets, the sound of clashing waves and shingle, and the comforts of marmalade on toast with a warming cuppa tea.

I always felt time was one of the most entrancing features of Jarman’s work, his sense of time as a dynamic force that changes like mercurial weather blowing in all direction, episodic as opposed to linear, fluid as opposed to fixed. To me he whispered of a rumoured hidden passageway far beneath the quicksilver skies and battlefield of now that leads to a forest beyond, a place of solace and resilience where poetic consciousness meets action."

_{Jason Molloy, Glyphs at the End of Time (2022)}

Iranian-born multidisciplinary artist, performer and writer Katayoun Jalilipour writes:

"My practice is concerned with speculative historic fiction. I am interested in reimagining verbal and visual histories that hint at queerness, which contextually have often been erased from archives. Within my ongoing research regarding the 19th Century in Iran, I often use digital alteration techniques on images from the Qajar era to imagine possibilities of queerness, with the aim to fill the gaps of visual queer representation in archival collections.

Within my ongoing project, Gut Feelings, I have been developing work around the concept of ‘fragments of truth’, pointing to the fact that we are too often given very minimal information about certain historical facts, such as queerness, therefore we are left to wonder and speculate. This is a powerful tool and inspiration I use within my work.

This residency is a valuable opportunity to me, as it will provide me with the time and resources to continue this research further, as well as supporting the continuation of a new moving image project."

_{Katayoun Jalilipour by Mischa De Stroumillo}

Turney Prize nominated artist, filmmaker and musician Luke Fowler says:

"I am delighted to be awarded one of the Prospect Cottage residencies. Since I began working on film, I’ve been concerned with finding new ways to meaningfully engage with rooms, spaces and the wider ecology of Scotland.  Representing “place” through the medium of 16mm film has been a preoccupation of mine since my earliest works and would be one of the ways I would spend my time in Dungeness.

I’ve been interested in the manifold ways that experimental filmmakers like Derek Jarman used the basic features of analogue film – editing in camera, shooting with different film speeds, making use of available light and collaborators to create films that were, and still are, psychically and politically charged.

I hope to use my time at Dungeness to reflect on my practice to date, whilst responding to Prospect Cottage and the wider geo-political landscape.  I intend to realise this through a daily practice of filming and sound recording within the locale. This form of visual notetaking would be anchored around daily journeys through the landscape - meditating on several on-going concerns as I walk, listen and look."

Filmmaker, artist and writer Topher Campbell explains:

"When I was very young, before I ever imagined becoming a filmmaker I met Derek through a friend, the filmmaker and Gilbert & George muse Julian Cole. My first visit to Prospect Cottage was a spontaneous fast drive down to a barren and alien landscape stuck out in the middle of nowhere. I had no idea where I was or who Derek was. I thought it was a bit weird to be living out amongst the harsh winds, dull skies and dirty sea.

Prospect Cottage, then, was ramshackle with an open fire and rattling windows but somehow I instantly became seduced by the power of the creativity all around me. All kinds of materials, wood, parchment paper, stone, ink, paints, and plants seemed to be in the process of being made into something else. I kept thinking who is this man? Over time I grew to know Derek and was one of the many who attended his funeral.

It's poetic and meaningful to be given the opportunity of staying at Prospect Cottage decades later and as a filmmaker embarking on writing my next works. As an artist its often not possible to separate from the world and dig deep into an idea or obsession. I have come here to do just that. I am writing my next film and contemplating the direction of my life in relation to finding a way to develop my artistic practice. I am Black and Queer and have always felt out of place and, somehow, out of place and out of the way Dungeness understands this. I understand what Prospect Cottage is for now. I understand why Derek needed the open, deliberate landscape as both a counterpoint and creative collaborator."

_{Topher Campbell, Writing from Prospect Cottage, November 2022.}