At HOME with Jerwood is an exciting new 12–month bespoke residency for four cross-artform artists in the North-West to make a step change in their practice and career. The selected artists will spend one year attached to HOME, working closely with the Artist Development team. This year’s selected artists are Afreena Islam-Wright, Lisa Mattocks, Alina Akbar and Gherdai Hassell.
Afreena Islam-Wright is a Manchester-based theatre maker and producer whose work is rooted in her experience of being the youngest child of old-school Bangladeshi parents. With this residency, Afreena hopes to expand her practice and scale up her work by exploring different artistic mediums to tell her stories.
Lisa Mattocks is an artist whose work is mainly conceived and created digitally. Lisa experiments with new technologies and makes work in unexpected places. After many years of supporting and collaborating with other artists, Lisa wants to focus more rigidly on her own solo creative practice, exploring the use of emerging technologies and creating an interactive online web exhibit that showcases all the work she never made. Through the project, Lisa hopes to connect with viewers in a unique and accessible way, offering a glimpse into a life and body of work, that as a result of a debilitating illness, would remain unrealised without the power of technology.
Alina Akbar is a visual artist and storyteller whose work spans film, photography and installation, and explores the complexities of working-class representation and issues of diversity. During her residency, Alina would like to further explore the use of film and video with a specific interest in a moving image project that looks at faith behind bars: how having an existing faith shapes people’s experience of life in prison and how prison might have an impact on people converting to a faith.
Gherdai Hassell is a Manchester-based, Bermuda-born multidisciplinary artist who uses mixed media techniques to thread and weave layers of history and the complexities of Caribbean heritage and identity. Gherdai will use this residency to expand her artistic practice with a specific focus on sculptural and textile work, with a particular interest in post- and anti-colonial histories via the intersections of gender, nationality, race, and Afro-futurism.
Each residency will culminate in a public-facing artistic outcome either as part of PUSH Festival, HOME’s biennial cross art–form festival for early career artists, or as a stand-alone event. The nature of the outcome may take many forms: a piece of theatre, an artist film, exhibition, installation, or digital intervention; and scales: a scratch performance, a public sharing, or a full production.
A call out for the second cohort of the programme will open in autumn 2023.
