Past Residencies
Our Residency Programmes are a way to explore new ideas, create work and contribute to our creative community. Residencies are awarded by application only. See below for a list of our current residency opportunities. Jelly is a diverse collective of practising artists at different stages of their creative development covering varied artforms. We work with many different communities from our central studio space in Reading town centre.
A residency at Jelly offers artists an experimental and supportive space to develop their creative practice and professional development. Current opportunities are updated and listed below:
Here is an archive of our residencies:
Open for Art - Gather 2023-24
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Not textile art: textiles in contemporary art.
Sue and Karis are weavers who work with contemporary materials to examine the political and culture meanings of textiles. They’ll be using the residency to investigate contemporary approaches to art weaving.
As weavers they are both interested in how textiles carry wider cultural meanings. Sue works on weaving as a metaphor for migration; Karis uses linen, a material with a long and rich history.
The residency will bring the weavers together to experiment small scale works, gathering contemporary materials such as paper yarns, rubco, monofilament as well as traditional fibres such as linen and cotton. The space will evolve over time, showing samples of their work.
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Open for Art Resident - 18 September to 1 October 2023
Ollie Musson is a Sheffield born, queer & trans artist, living and working in Reading. They are a drag performer under the name Sheer Obsession, and an artist who uses performance, film, sound, and text to create surreal narratives of transformation through gender, health, and trauma. These moments occur in the intersections of mental and physical illness, critiquing standards of health through expanding on (dis)ableist frameworks of bodily experiences. Notions of rest and recovery lay alongside an embodied trans experience of gender, creating an intersectional Queer and Crip strand of research.
Marginalised queer and working-class communities established drag and cabaret as forms of resistance, entertainment, and community. Through this history Ollie has learnt to straddle care, safety, and connection with audiences. They use DIY publishing and zines as written documentation and community resources, and through printmaking they reclaim art methodologies that have traditionally been held within an institutional narrative.
In 2018, Ollie co-founded Double Okay, a queer/trans artist collective in Reading. Double Okay curates performance nights, exhibitions, and workshops to create safer platforms for marginalised voices and LGBTQIA+ people. Ollie also runs a bimonthly DIY and grassroots drag nights called Sheer Obsession’s Suspenders.
Website: www.olliemusson.com
Instagram: @sheer.obsession / @sheerdesperation
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Open for Art Resident - 7 August to 21 August 2023
Julie is a visual artist who works with mixed media such as paper, fabric, wood, and papier-mâché. She predominately a 3D artist, drawn to creating figurative and illustrated pieces. Julie is actively involved with Jelly as an arts educator; delivering art workshops to schools and CPD workshops. Julie has most recently been working on using a sewing machine as a means to draw and create collages. Using the sewing machine to draw is a tactile and meditative way for Julie to create. This type of creating can also be random, accidental, and intuitive. The pieces Julie creates are patchworks squares that stand alone but also part of a larger piece. The pieces together will create a large quilt with the theme based on A Manifesto for Her. A collage of sayings, quotes, lyrics, words. Once complete, the blanket can be wrapped around and have the power to protect and heal.
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Open for Art Resident - July 2023
Born in Sunderland, Susan Atwill is a sound hunter & part-function/part-fiction artist. Inspired by her grandparents’ homes, cultural history and roots in mining communities of North East England, she creates alternative realities using time-based media such as casting, film & sound.
Find about more about Susan’s work by visiting instagram Click here - @stopstartin
12 Artists At Home Residencies 2020
A project supported by public funding from Arts Council England through The National Lottery Programme as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Submissions were invited from artists across any media, with the opportunity to be one of the 12 home based collaborative residencies that took place between June – September 2020.
Each artist was partnered with one of the other selected artists and in most cases this was someone new to them and their practice.
Here are our final 12, working together and alone. We followed their journey.
“This residency has genuinely been an awakening for me. It has given me time to pause, think, play but most unexpectedly to accept myself as an artist!”
Zillah Puri’s thoughts on the impact of residency on her creative practice
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During Zillah’s time of self- isolation she become acutely aware of her own bodily autonomy – or lack thereof. Although Zillah’s body is a vessel of love and comfort for her children, she noticed that it is a space to be invaded and used for their own needs and comfort. This was conflicting for her, highlighting her need for personal space, both physical and emotional.
Exploring this idea further, Zillah contemplates: what is bodily autonomy? What does it feel and look like? Where and how are the boundaries and borders, between the body, self and other drawn?
Instagram: @zillahpuri
Zillah Puri’s collaborative partner - Heather McAteer
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The ‘At Home’ residency supports Ella’s ‘Perceptual Field’ project, working directly from the sound of birdsong in ancient woodland on Shotover Hill, Oxford.
The project develops ways of rendering abstract notations describing the shapes, patterns, rhythms and undulations of birdsong. Perception of sound prompts and affects the marks’ weight, speed, and movement. And the work investigates the boundaries and overlaps between visuality and hearing, drawing and painting, and neurology and poetics.
This coming-into-being of perception, in real time, is the subject matter of the resulting work, as well as the process.
Instagram: @ellaclocksin_artist_studio
Ella Clocksin’s collaborative partner - Fiona Talkington
“The collaboration with Laura de Moxom has been very valuable to me. It has helped me having structure during this time and to feel connected to the art community. It has been fantastic to learn about her process and interests. To be able to spend time nurturing and understanding my inner artist has been extremely valuable and I believe this also reflects in my work.” - Valentina Gonález-Sáez
— Valentina reflects on what the residency meant to her during lockdown
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Linda Newcombe makes illustrative works, usually on paper. She is interested in the elusive nature of folk-traditions and folk-arts and in the child-like delight of the unexpected. Linda pushes the boundaries of what it is to experience a book or illustration beyond the traditional text or context. During this residency Linda worked with her collaborative partner Mo Soliman and experimented with animation using drawings, prints and papers.
Linda Newcombe’s collaborative partner - Mo Soliman
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With the onset of the Covid-19 crisis, the idea of what constitutes ‘home’ came sharply into focus for Heather. Heather realised that she may not be able to visit her parents (who still live in her childhood home in Belfast) for quite some time. Heather’s ‘At Home’ residency project, entitled ‘Touching From a Distance’, is a visual dialogue with her parents, connecting life in Reading with their daily lives in Belfast. Her work resonates of past and present times and operates as a bridge between our own isolated existences.
Website: www.heathermcateer.co.uk
Instagram: @heathermcateer
Heather McAteer’s collaborative partner - Zillah Puri
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At home since March, Fiona Talkington had not seen the outside of her house. She moved to this house when she was two, and is surrounded by its memories and history.
Her residency is a gift to her house a gift, a series of vignettes of written and spoken memories and imagined futures: textures, colours, sounds. Isolation brings its own view of the world as well as a renewed sense of belonging and community. Collaboration brings the excitement of artistic adventure. Fiona Talkington explores the questions ‘How many decades have we known each other?’ Maybe she does not yet know the houses heart and soul.
The video above is a zoom meeting recorded in September 2020 where Fiona discusses her residency and how her project may evolve.
Fiona Talkington’s collaborative partner - Ella Clocksin
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Mo Soliman is a Stop Motion animator trained at Aardman. During this residency he collaborated with Linda Newcombe and together they shared skills to develop storyboard ideas, character designing, puppet fabrication and sculpting to create stop motion animations. A long lasting collaborative partnership with many possibilities beyond the residency.
Mo Soliman’s collaborative partner - Linda Newcombe
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During Lockdown Lisa-Marie would cycle to the river at the back of her house. She would cycle the same routes that she used to walk as a child, retracing the same footsteps. As a child, this was a place that she was not supposed to go on her own but she did and she would feel as free as a bird.
To accompany the film Lisa-Marie created a series montotypes, working directly with printing ink onto a piece of glass. Limited editions are available here: www.lisamariegibbs.bigcartel.com
Lisa-Marie’s collaborative partner - Matt Hulse
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Sanctuary (Noun): A condition of isolation or seclusion from worldly or practical affairs; a sheltered,protected existence removed from the harsh realities of life.
Throughout the history of art, it has been the typical fate of the Artist to make their work alone and in isolation. John collaborated directly with each of the selected artists – asking them to suggest locations that they found as a place of sanctuary during their lockdown experience. This could be a place they found during their daily exercise or a place they hoped to visit once lockdown is lifted. Alongside each artist’s image are some of the many artefacts that Daisy Angerson made or collected during lockdown with her father.
John Angerson’s collaborative partner - Amy Beddow
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Valentina González-Sáez is an Architect by profession and Artist by heart. Valentina uses her architectural skills of maps and topographical drawings and applies them with an abstract aesthetic. She questions ‘Is our culture influenced by the spaces we design to live in, is our way of building relationships with other people influenced by the way we design cities?’ During her residency she explored this relationship between the ‘architect’ and the ‘artist’.
@valentina.gonzalez.art
Valentina González-Sáez’s collaborative partner - Laura de Moxom
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Mischief and mayhem all offline via postcards, voice messages and arm-chair travel to his collaborative partner Lisa-Marie Gibbs. Together they worked on sound recordings and artwork for future publications. A lasting friendship and collaborative possibilities that will continue way beyond lockdown.
Matt Hulse’s collaborative partner - Lisa-Marie Gibbs
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Beauty lies in moments of the everyday; the texture of a fabric, a strip of light, a familiar sound. Lockdown has brought a stillness, a time to observe things around us. Everything is closer.
During July 2020, a group of children from Reading took part in a workshop with Amy to capture their near environment using photography and sound recordings. Amy curated the children’s explorations to create an abstract journey though their close encounters. A collaboration and exchange between us at a time of separation.
Amy Beddow’s collaborative partner - John Angerson
“My experience of the ‘At Home’ residency with Jelly has been a step change for me as an artist; in ways I could not have imagined when I applied, and this was only possible because of the dual prongs of support and freedom that the program offered.”
— Thoughts from Laura de Moxom on the impact of the residency
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Laura’s residency formed a research project grounded in making. Her practice explores memory; its attachment to objects and the materiality of photographs, using a visual language of historic alternative photographic techniques, image transfer, assemblage and paint. Concern over the misalignment of the inherent toxicity within the light sensitive emulsions used in alternative photographic processes, and Laura’s political values, has led to research into sustainable methods; in order to continue exploring these mediums within her practice.
Laura de Moxom’s collaborative partner - Valentina González-Sáez
Current Residencies
Associate Eye - Artist Films
