Ciara Phillips Residency

On-site exhibition cancelled due to Covid-19

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Canadian/Irish artist Ciara Phillips works with printmaking processes to make art both alone and in collaboration with others.  Through her practice, she explores the physical and tactile properties of printing and considers its histories and legacies as they relate to art and the wider realm of information production and dissemination. Phillips works with print in expansive ways, using its reproductive quality to create large-scale installations, and exploring its particular characteristics of mediation and transference to create new screenprints, relief prints and etchings. She prioritizes improvisation over certainty, and ideas are developed and tested out through hands-on making.

Since 2010 her ongoing artwork Workshop has explored how shared art-making can build solidarity within groups and with others. Through Workshop the gallery becomes a simply constructed print studio that hosts a wide range of interactions between Phillips and her collaborators, the audience and the hosting institution itself.  It makes visible the processes of discussion and production that are more commonly kept private and it proposes that an exhibition can continue to evolve even when the doors to the institution are open and the public is present.  Workshop makes a virtue of the duration of an exhibition and uses the infrastructure and support of an institution to forge new relationships and ideas.  It sets in motion a complex set of questions about who should be doing what and why, and it does this by claiming space for thoughts and approaches to be tested out in the presence of others.

During her residency at Open Studio, Phillips will be working alongside our Master Printmakers to produce a new body of work that will be exhibited in our gallery in September 2020.

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Ciara Phillips (b. 1976, Ottawa, Canada) has exhibited widely in public galleries and museums in the UK and internationally. Her long-term artwork Workshop (2010 – ongoing) was nominated for a Turner Prize in 2014. Recent exhibitions of Phillips’ work have been staged at Kunsthall Stavanger; V&A Dundee; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; Benaki Museum, Athens; Bergen Kunsthall; TATE Britain, London; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston; Western Front, Vancouver and The Showroom, London. Phillips has been artist-in-residence at Trykkeriet, Bergen, Headlands Centre for the Arts in Marin County California, St. John’s College, Oxford, and at Drawing Room, London. She has worked as a lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Cumbria and Glasgow School of Art, and she is currently a Visiting Professor at the University of the Arts in Helsinki. In 2020 she will be staging solo exhibitions at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, The Model in Sligo, Ireland and at Open Studio in Toronto.

Any time there is a surface there is a surface and every time there is a suggestion there is a suggestion and every time there is silence there is silence and every time that is languid there is that there then and not oftener, not always, not particular, tender and changing and external and central and surrounded and singular and simple and the same and the surface and the circle and the shine and the succour and the white and the same and the better and the red and the same and the centre and the yellow and the tender and the better, and altogether.
– Gertrude Stein, 1914 

This residency is generously supported by Partners in Art (PIA)