The Art House and Outside In are excited to announce artist alabamathirteen has been selected for their first joint residency.
‘Excited and honoured’ is how alabamathirteen described their feelings about being selected. “Due to my disability, taking part in a residency is not an option that is often open to me personally, so I am pretty much ecstatic for the opportunity to develop my practice with the support of inclusive, accessible and welcoming organisations.”
Amanda Sutton, acting director for Outside In, added that she was sure the ‘fantastic opportunity’ will make ‘all the difference’ to an artist who is at a pivotal point in their career. “The accessible facilities and support provided by The Art House are unique in the field, making it possible for the artist – regardless of the barriers they may usually face – to be an artist and develop their creative practice in ways they couldn’t otherwise. Outside In would like to say thank you to all at The Art House and we are excited to see the outcomes.”
Christopher Samuel and Sunil Shah were external selectors for the opportunity, offering their insight as creative practitioners to the process.
Sydney Thornbury, CEO/Artistic Director for The Art House, said: “We were very pleased to have two talented creative practitioners supporting the selection process for our upcoming joint residency with Outside In. Both Sunil and Christopher bring an invaluable wealth of experience as artists/curators to the review and selection process.”
Christopher said he was ‘delighted’ to be part of the selection panel. He added: “This residency gives artists the space and opportunity to explore and experiment, and to make work in a space that they wouldn’t ordinarily have access to. As a disabled artist, or an artist that facing barriers, having access to dedicated accessible spaces like this is really valuable.”
Meet the artist:
“I am a largely self-taught, working-class, disabled artist from Leeds. Increasingly my work is focused on my own personal limitations navigating and negotiating the spaces and places I occupy as a disabled woman. My work has always focused around bodies, spaces and places and how we experience and occupy them both as individuals and as a society (I have an academic background in sociology so once a sociologist, always a sociologist!). As my work has developed over the last few years my life has become increasingly impacted by the realities of being disabled, and so has my practice, both creatively and practically. Right now there are some particularly strong themes around false narratives and distorted memories emerging in my work.
I use a lot of photography in my work. I am particularly interested in how photography in itself can be considered a distorted representation of a moment in time. I also use a lot of traditional forms of embroidery in my work, predominantly cross stitch and blackwork embroidery. As well as allowing me to add additional layers of distortion and narrative on top of the photographic images, I really love that embroidery brings with it its very own layer of rich and subversive history as ‘women’s work’.”
Artist's website
Meet the selectors:
Christopher Samuel
Christopher Samuel is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice is rooted in identity and disability politics, often echoing the many facets of his own lived experience.
Seeking to interrogate his personal understanding of identity as a disabled person impacted by inequality and marginalisation, Christopher responds with urgency, humour, and poetic subversiveness within his work.
This approach makes his work accessible to a wider audience, allowing others to identify and relate to a wider spectrum of human experience.
Graduate of Fine Art, who has exhibited widely including solo shows at Attenborough Art Centre (2018) and BBC Leicester (2016); through group shows such as The Full Light of Day, VAE Raleigh USA (2020); THE IDLE INDEX – online (2019); LoveArt – New Walk Museum (2017); Outside In (2016); Shape Open (2012); Funded by the publicly funded art sector through Arts Council England, Unlimited, and Attenborough Art Centre and received commissions from Phoenix, Hereward College, and De Montfort University.
Sunil Shah
Sunil Shah is an artist, writer and independent curator based in Oxford, UK. He is director of CODA Projects, a new research platform for the aesthetics of race in art and visual culture. His interests broadly span art histories and the sites and structures of artistic production and presentation. He is PhD Candidate at Central St.Martins, UAL where his research involves reading Documenta11 against contemporary curatorial and cultural theory. He is Associate Editor of American Suburb X online visual culture platform.
Artist works, commissions and curatorial projects have been realised with the International Curators Forum, The Photographers Gallery, the Royal Geographic Society, the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), Modern Art Oxford, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, the New Art Exchange, Nottingham, Brighton Photo Fringe, Output Gallery and Metal, Liverpool and at the Venice Biennale in 2017 and 2019
Image: The Condor by alabamathirteen. Photograph embroidered with invisible thread, 2020.
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