Cove Park’s UK Visual Arts Residencies support established visual artists based in the United Kingdom. These residencies enable artists to develop new work and, in many cases for the first time, to spend a prolonged period living and working in Scotland. Recent residents include Adam Chodzko, Mike Cooter, Chris Evans, Ruth Ewan, Anja Kirschner, Olivia Plender and Alison Turnbull.

Melissa Gordon will be based at Cove Park for six weeks this summer. Her work as a painter and printmaker follows the cyclical relationship between surface and reproduction, representation and abstraction and seeing and reading, and is often focused on by-products: of history, of medium and of making. In much of her work she utilizes the investigative gesture of enlarging details that reveal hidden structures, zooming in on patterns of reproductive processes, or obscuring information with abstract systems.

Following an intense period of exhibitions, both in the UK and overseas, Melissa will use her time on residency to consider how her wider projects (curating, editing the independent magazine PERSONA and teaching) can be incorporated into her ongoing studio practice. At what she feels to be a transitional moment in her practice, she will have the opportunity to experiment, to research new ideas and to begin to develop new bodies of work.