Artist & Writer In Residence 2010-11

Ruth Padel: Writer in Residence

Ruth Padel is an award-winning British poet, critic and novelist, Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London and Member of Bombay Natural History Society. Her seven poetry collections include Darwin - A Life in Poems, the internationally acclaimed verse biography of her great-great-grandfather Charles Darwin. Her non-fiction includes Tigers in Red Weather, a celebrated account of tiger conservation throughout Asia, and two much-loved books on reading contemporary poems, 52 Ways of Reading a Poem and The Poem and the Journey. More recently, Silent Letters of the Alphabet addresses poetry’s use of silence. Her first novel, Where the Serpent Lives, explores the way we use metaphors from animals and the natural world to understand ourselves, and features field zoology in forests of and Devon, and wildlife crime in London and Asia.

"Evocative depictions of life in the fast-degrading forests of India. She paints an apocalyptic picture of the ways in which the world’s wild animals are being endangered not only by the greed of criminals but also by the peasant's desperate search for sustenance in economies interested only in development."  (Independent)

Ruth started out as a Greek scholar at Oxford, has taught Greek in  Birkbeck College London and taught opera in the Modern Greek Department at Princeton, and published two books on ideas of mind, body and madness in Greek tragedy. She lived several years in Greece before becoming a freelance writer and is currently writing a mixed book of prose and poetry on migration, animal and human.

Click here for Ruth's website.

~in the fields (Nicole Heidtke and Stefan Baumberger): Artists in Residence

~ in the fields is an artists’ collaboration, founded by German artists Nicole Heidtke and Stefan Baumberger in Edinburgh, 2005, being awarded the UdK Award (University of the Arts, Berlin) for Interdisciplinary Art and Science 2010 for their work ink and commissioned UK wide for installations in public space.

~ in the fields’ work emphasizes natural phenomena and condenses poetic moments in inventions of autonomous, cocooned systems. Their visual art practice draws from archival material, environmental topics and ephemeral artefacts such as lost kinds of cinema.

They have been Artists in Residence at the Highland Hospice, Inverness and been awarded the Scottish Arts Council New Media Residency and the alt-w award for their research project floc, based on the bird island Bass Rock and gannets’ migration.

Their installations are responsive, of modular appearance and often powered with solar energy such as their work ume - considering the transformation from winter to spring - having been part of touring exhibitions across Scotland and London.

There is always a sense of anticipation in seeing ~ in the fields’ work because of its integrity, beauty and inventiveness. (Katie Nicoll, Independent Producer)

Nicole has been teaching at the Bauhaus University Weimar, Germany, founding the pioneering masters programme media architecture. Stefan has been researching at the Institute for Advanced Media Arts and Sciences, Ogaki, Japan.

Click here for the poposed programme of work (pdf)

Click for two supporting images: here and here

Please click here for their website.


JLTRe

The Artist and Writer in Residence programme has been funded by a donation from JLTRe. Please click on the logo for their company website.