Artists in Residence 2024/2025

Charlotte Dunn

Website: https://charlottedunn.co.uk
Instagram handle: @charlartslive

Charlotte is a drawing installation artist from Shropshire. She has in the past exhibited with the NHS and Wolverhampton Art Gallery as well as has taken part in residencies with Mind and Crohns and Colitis UK. In 2022 Charlotte exhibited within Offsite 9 within the British Art Show 9. 

In my practice I aim to question and transform traditions that form the way we analyse and comprehend our environment. I have in the past concentrated on the idea of manipulating the idea of our historical quest for knowledge. I often look at manipulating scientific imagery, transforming its context through methods of presentation. The power that tools of presentation have to alter the context of a subject inspires me to transform objects, looking at individual perception and what knowledge we gather from informative presentation. 

Drawing is an essential medium within my practice. Methods of scientific illustration and medical imagery create a foundation for me to distort, commenting upon their purpose to educate and inform. The illustrative quality that underlies my work, takes references from formal methods used within scientific illustration, adopting highly accurate techniques of drawing. I am constantly intrigued by microscopic studies, and the ‘patterns’ created by medical imagery. Research is fundamentally important in my practice and is a crucial factor in the success of any piece that references scientific concepts and historical practices. The significance of exploring presentation methods form a key step in the work I produce, providing me with ‘rules’ that I manipulate to artistic effect. 

Charlotte is working on the Seedcorn project “Developing mathematical models for seizure forecasting in epilepsy.”

Andee Collard

Andee Collard is a visual artist based in Bolton. He is interested in the process, tools, and how digital technology can be used in the production of analogue painting and drawing. Andee develops his own software and hardware driven by the artwork he wants to create. Collard’s work is a love letter to painting as well as to the photographic image. 

His paintings use AI co-developed tools to generate, process, and dither the photographic image into a painting. The images celebrate digital artefacts like pixelation, banding, and noise alongside hallmarks of the artist’s studio like impasto painting, gesture and the interplay of rich colour. Andee is fascinated by technology and its influence on history. He sees his use of machinery as part of the tradition of past artists who used the inventions of the modern world to capture their contemporary view.

Andee is particularly fond of Monet’s inventive practices, which included making work in quasi-photographic series, operating a floating studio boat, and even digging a trench to more easily paint a large canvas outdoors. Artists have always found new ways of working, and Andee is excited by the opportunities afforded by digital machines to assist in making analogue paintings and drawings.

Andee is working on the Seedcorn project “Movement as a window to infant brain development.”

Christie Swallow

Christie (b. 1998) is an artist and designer who crafts stories through textiles. With a background in architecture, their work explores the visual culture of techno-science, offering critical reflections on the hegemonic ways of seeing the world.

They are interested in how fabric entangles us all, and how fibres can be used to examine what it means to live within the Anthropocene. They work with textiles as a medium which is always already entangled with economics and geology; from the cultivation of plants, to fibres which are woven by the global working class. They are interested in the capacity textiles have to affect people, through tapping into our embodied relationship with the material(s) that clothes us, cover us, and keep us warm.

Between text and textile, they seek to tell new stories about old ideas. Between archives and the present, they seek to disentangle the webs of meaning that have shaped our contemporary attitude towards nature, towards other humans, and through this seeks to patch together new narratives from the scraps of a damaged world.

Christie is an Artist in Residence at SMQB, University of Birmingham, and an upcoming Maker in Residence at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. They have exhibited in London, Lisbon, and Leicester, and were previously an artist in residence at Hangar CIA, Lisbon.

Christie is working on the Seedcorn project “Learning to group psychotic patients using blood neuroinflammatory biomarkers and brain imaging.”

Alexandra Davenport (she/her)

Website: https://alexdavenport.com

Alexandra Davenport is an artist and educator, based in Birmingham UK. Her research-led practice considers the complex relationship between the body, knowledge, and representation. Signalling back to her history in dance, she uses choreography, photography, moving image and text to rethink conventional approaches to image-making. Increasingly, her work operates at the intersection of art and science – interweaving diverse forms of knowing through a lens of intersectional feminist discourse.

Her work has been exhibited in the UK and internationally, in group and solo exhibitions at institutions and festivals such as Derby QUAD (UK), Wilhelm-Hack-Museum (DE), Museum of London (UK), Hanes Art Gallery (USA), Peckham 24 (UK), A Performance Affair (BG), Summerhall (UK) & The Nunnery Gallery (UK). 

Christie is working on the Seedcorn project “Learning to group psychotic patients using blood neuroinflammatory biomarkers and brain imaging.”

Dan Auluk (he/him)

Website: www.danauluk.com

Dan is an artist-curator, writer and filmmaker from a formal science and arts background, and has worked within Health and Wellbeing for 25 years, primarily as a wellbeing worker with and for LGBTQ+ people; in community, NHS, charity and university settings. 

Dan’s creative practice explores the ways in which we communicate and interconnect through an internal exploration of his own emotional and physical boundaries in relation to his identity and long-term invisible health condition. The starting point is always around informal conversations, enabling initial drawings and mark making and creative writing.

Pre-pandemic Dan set up live durational situations that attempt to disrupt and displace our experience of what we are observing; experimenting with performance, participation and intervention. The activity of drawing, text, spoken word, sound and video often transform as live art collaborative performances and exhibitions, creative group projects involving artists and audiences in the process. Recently his practice has shifted to ‘one-to-one’ interventions informed by lived experiences of identity, belonging, isolation, ageing and on grief and grieving.

Currently, Dan is responding to photographs donated by his mother; exploring his queer identity and cultural displacement and developing drawings, audio, video and creative writings (short films and stage plays) in response to this archive and personal ephemera.  

Since the pandemic and with recent life-disrupting medical scares Dan’s research is centred around self-compassion and neuroplasticity of our brains in relation to mental health and wellbeing.

Dan is working on the Seedcorn project “A mathematical method for connecting people living with depression to the right treatment.”

Tom Ellis

Website: https://www.curiousoddities.co.uk

Tom is a Midlands based artist who runs a creative company Curious Oddities. He’s a maker of fantastical creatures and magical artefacts. Inspired by fantasy, myths and storytelling, alongside a huge hoard of foraged and found materials, from Victoriana to Vegetation. From these he’s created a menagerie of wondrous beasts and objects to scare and delight, all with a unique story to tell.

Tom is passionate about collaborating with a wide range of individuals and groups, working with a variety of inspiring materials. Ultimately, he aims to create really rewarding, ambitious and imaginative projects. This includes Workshops, Puppeteering, Prop Making, Creature Design and Practical Film Effects. 

Tom is working on the Seedcorn project “Improving the diagnosis of acute compartment syndrome using data-driven models.”