Residency: September – December 2023
Exhibition: April-May 2024 (exact dates TBC)
Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village
As part of The Ceramic House Edges project, artist-curators Kay Aplin & Joseph Young undertake a residency at Watts Gallery in autumn 2023. Following on from their residency at Interface in Ireland in June 2023, where they spent a month researching the landscape of Connemara, the Watts residency provides opportunities for investigating the heritage and history of Watts and time for making, to create new work inspired by both sites. The resulting work will be exhibited in Watts Gallery in April 2024, bringing the Edges project to a conclusion.
As an artist couple/collaborative partnership, Kay and Joseph are keen to explore the legacy of GF and Mary Watts as well as the ceramic tradition of Compton Pottery through a number of different artistic strategies. Their base at The Ceramic House also provides an analogy to Limnerslease with their pop-up gallery, events and performances programme and artistic residency programme set within a unique artist’s home. Situated just outside the reach of Greater London, the geographical location of Watts Artist Village coincidentally fits within the context of the Edges project as it relates to boundaries.
The autumn residency of Kay Aplin and Joseph Young at Watts Gallery will produce:
- An concluding exhibition of residency works to be situated site-responsively across the Watts Estate
- A geo-located sound trail in various locations around the estate exploring both the collaborative process, archival material from Watts and field recordings
- Programme of ceramic and sound workshops
- Artist talks and events
Produced by artist-curators Kay Aplin & Joseph Young of The Ceramic House, Edges is a ceramics & sound art collaborative project involving artists from three nations at the western and eastern edges of Europe. Partners include: Wexford Arts Centre, Interface Residency Centre, Connemara, Estonia Academy of Arts, Framework Radio, Belfast School of Art, Limerick School of Art and Design, Atlantic Technological University, Galway and Watts Gallery.
Edges will develop ideas of exchange, what it means to work at the edge of something, to be on the fringes, and how we understand the outsider. ‘Edges’ also expands on positive concepts of materiality, understanding artistic practice as a so-called ‘cutting edge’, where boundaries are pushed back, and frontiers explored. Edges also explores geographical boundaries and coastlines.
