Featured Artist, March 2017
Jasleen Kaur was Cove Park’s UK Craft resident in 2015. Jasleen graduated from the Silversmithing and Jewellery department of Glasgow School of Art in 2008 and then went on to study Applied Art at the Royal College of Art in 2009 -10. Subsequently her practice has moved away from wearable art to incorporate object making, film and events, mediums she uses to explore our relationship to culture in a wider sense. A major catalyst is her traditional Sikh upbringing in Glasgow, which provokes her fascination with “the malleability of culture and the layering of social histories within materials and objects.” Her time at Cove Park was spent analysing the embedded cultural narratives of a particular set of materials, including marbled plastic, 70’s Axminster-type carpet, silicon sealant and foil Christmas decorations, exploring potential meeting points between adopted functions and cultural aesthetics and connections.
“I applied to the residency at a point when I felt the need for time to carry out specific research, material experimentation and reflect on the direction of my practice. I am naturally a fast worker and juggle a lot of projects at once so the idea of working remotely and slowly was daunting at first. I deliberately didn’t try to produce any finished work in my 8 weeks there, but in the months following the residency I began developing some of those initial ideas into more resolved outcomes and I’m still doing so now. As a Scottish artist based in London, one of the most significant effects of Cove was making connections with peers based in Scotland, some of which I’ve worked with since.”
Since her residency, Jasleen has been part of several prestigious projects and exhibitions across the UK for example; Baltic 39 Figure Three at Baltic 39 in Newcastle, The Thing with Maltasingh, a collaborative project and exhibition at Gallery SO as part of the London Design Festival, The Tending of Something, an exhibition and symposium at St Andrews Museum with FCAC and most recently Collecting Europe at the V&A Museum, London.

Image: Jasleen Kaur, Cove Park Studio, 2015 – photography by Eoin Carey