Cove Park has worked with the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities on a pilot project to bring a PhD student here for 1 week’s research residency. 2017’s successful candidate is Daphne de Sonneville.

Daphne de Sonneville (born in Amsterdam, currently living in Glasgow) is an artist and writer working with written fiction, performances, video and sculpture, and a practice-based PhD candidate at the Edinburgh College of Art.

In her research project The Descend of Significance: Slapstick and Abstraction, she employs slapstick as a method to investigate the relationship between materiality and abstraction in language. While slapstick originates from physical theatre, she researches how it can be used to structure a text. Working with repetition and language modifications, her writing focuses on ‘how’ rather than ‘what’. She questions whether language can be a character in itself, and makes it ‘act’ in a visual art context. She performs her writings using sculptural and audiovisual props, asking if the materiality of language is tragic.