The Jerwood Arts / FACT Digital Fellowship emerged from FACT’s ongoing commitment to nurturing a diverse new generation of artists, curators, film-makers, creative technologists and critical thinkers based in the UK. The fellowship received applications from over 260 creatives.
Responding to FACT’s year of The Living Planet which focuses on themes including climate change, ecology and community building, the selected artists were chosen by a panel of curators, producers, artists and researchers: Mariama Attah (Curator, Open Eye Gallery), Gabrielle Jenks (Director of Digital, The Factory), Antonio Roberts (Artist and Curator), and Maitreyi Maheshwari (Head of Programme, FACT).
The Fellows will take part in a remote residency to research and develop their initial proposal. During this time, using digital tools, they will receive bespoke training, mentoring, crits, production support and research input from the team at FACT, the other Fellows, and an invited selection of wider collaborators. Each residency will take place remotely and Fellows will present their work in Spring 2021. The awarded Fellows are:
Yambe Tam (London, UK)
Angela Chan (East Midlands, UK)
Tessa Norton (West Yorkshire, UK)
Mariama Attah, Curator at Open Eye Gallery and jury member, said: “The selected artists for the Jerwood / FACT Digital Fellowship each showed a sensitivity and excitement in their use of technologies and in their vision for how we inhabit the world. The imagined spaces and alternative realities demonstrate not just the necessities that we draw from the world, but also sources of joy, knowledge and community.”
Yambe Tam is an artist whose creative practice centres around the evolution of consciousness in living and artificial beings. Her artwork takes the form of virtual spaces and immersive sculptural installations, and is informed by the fields of sensory ecology, evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and theoretical physics, as well as her practice of Zen Buddhism. Through collaborations with composers, creative technologists, and scientists, she creates contemplative, embodied experiences of speculative futures and invisible realities.
Angela Chan is a ‘creative climate change communicator’, working with curation, research and art. She is focused on decolonial climate justice, geography and contemporary speculative fiction. Her research-based art practice uses video, communal conversations and speculative fiction, to map and reconfigure climate communication and knowledge from minoritised experiences. Angela also independently runs Worm: art + ecology and co-founded the London Chinese Science Fiction Group.
Tessa Norton is a writer and artist based in West Yorkshire. Her work spans text, publications, performance and events, playfully exploring cosmic and expansive worlds using unlikely theoretical frameworks, like pop music, teen movies and ghost stories. Her writing has appeared in Tribune, The Wire, Doggerland, The Bad Vibes Club Reader, Corridor 8, LAUGH, Hoax and Art Licks, and in events at The Tetley, Liverpool Biennial, Flat Time House, SPACE, Shady Todmorden, Ex-Baldessarre and more. She is co-editor, with Bob Stanley, of the book Excavate: The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall (Faber & Faber, forthcoming 2021).
The Fellows will be encouraged to experiment with different online platforms, as well as test out elements of their research with the public in Spring 2021. In addition, Fellows are invited to participate in FACT’s Transformer Summit 2021, a gathering of leading artists and thinkers to help shape the questions we will explore in our wider future programme. Through this new initiative supported by Jerwood Arts, FACT will continue to champion artistic, cultural and disruptive uses of new media and technology, and further art’s engagement with scientific knowledge.
Link: www.fact.co.uk