Creative Carbon Scotland are, for the first time, partnering with Cove Park for their annual Arts & Sustainability Residency. This year the open call drew applications from over 100 artists from a variety of disciplines; 8 were selected and are as follows:

Reem Alkayyem

Reem Alkayyem is a Syrian born and educated architect. She has practiced architecture for 15 years in her home country and has MScs from the University of Edinburgh in Architectural Project Mangagement (2012) and Advanced Sustainable Design (2016). She aims to enhance and disseminate the knowledge of sustainability to include the social and cultural aspects in addition to environmental. She is additionally keen to contribute to the reconstruction of her country and to educate future architects on sound and sustainable bases.

Kathyrn Beckett

Kathy describes her creative practice as ‘in exploration of ecocentric approaches’, seeing that her responsibility and passion as an artist is to help serve a more beautiful, life sustaining world. She works across a range of mediums, with people and nature at the core of her activity and, public engagement as a vehicle of expression. She has been contracted as a project artist concerned with environmental sustainability for a range of organisations, including the Glasgow School of Art, Creative Carbon Scotland and North Light Arts.

Simon Gall

Simon Gall is a musician, composer and educator based in Aberdeenshire. He has toured (and continues to tour) internationally, recording with a number of artists including well-known world music band Salsa Celtica, Cuban band Son al Son and more recently contemporary Scottish folk duo Clype.

Alex Mackay

Alex Mackay is a sound artist, composer and performer based in Glasgow, making work across media including sound/music, image and performance for a wide range of contexts, including recorded media, installation, live performance as well as collaborative work in the fields of visual art, dance and film.

Victoria MacKenzie

Victoria MacKenzie is a fiction writer working on her first novel, Brantwood, about the life of art critic and social reformer John Ruskin, as well as a short fiction collection, Creaturely, which explores our connections with other species.

Michael Stumpf

Michael Stumpf (born in Mannheim, Germany) is a visual artist who works primarily in sculpture. In addition to his own practice he is currently a member of the artist group Poster Club. Recent exhibitions include: New Wheat New Mud New Machine (with Poster Club) Cooper Gallery, Dundee; Objects Converse on a Matter of Mutual Concern, Art Across the City, Swansea; This Song Belongs to those Who Sing It, Mackintosh Gallery, Glasgow School of Art; In Other Words, Lewis Glucksmann Gallery, Cork; New Alchemy/Contemporary Art after Beuys, Landesmuseum, Münster

Samuel Tongue

A hybrid of lyric and language poetry, Samuel’s practice is inter-medial and parasitic, living within, feeding from, and provoking a variety of artistic forms. Poems are search patterns, part of a meshwork of ideas and concepts, rooted in an incorrigibly plural world.

Jenna Watt

Jenna Watt is a multi award-winning Scottish theatre maker. Her latest work; Faslane, written in part at Cove Park, received a 2016 Scotsman Fringe First Award at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.

The weekend, co-facilitated by Jan Bebbington, Professor of Accounting and Sustainable Development, St Andrews Sustainability Institute, and Lex ter Braak, Director, Van Eyck Institute, Maastrict, Netherlands aims to explore and reflect upon humanity’s impact on the planet and the role of the arts in transitioning to a more environmentally sustainable society.

The residency will equip artists with opportunities to think about the role of cultural practices, learn from one another and develop their own work in relation to environmental sustainability. Artists are not expected to produce new work during the short residency, but rather use the experience as a springboard for future development in relation to residency themes and wider social change.

Working in partnership with Cove Park, Creative Carbon Scotland’s third annual artist residency will focus on the Anthropocene, a period of geological time which places humanity at the centre of the recent global environmental changes.

This year’s arts and sustainability residency is funded by Creative Scotland and kindly supported by the Dr David Summers Charitable Trust and is run in partnership with Cove Park.