Artists Residencies

Since 2022 we have offered funded stay-away multidisciplinary residencies. Across this time we have held both individual and group residencies. Our group residencies gather a cohort of Black and Brown women and gender variant artists and practitioners, sharing space and time on site while each remains rooted in their own practice. Practices spanning painting, film, textile, performance, sound, food and writing have been welcomed across our residency programmes.

All residencies provide a fee, travel, per diems, a studio space and producer support. Our ethos is one of self-directed creative practice. Artists manage their own time and rhythm during a residency, and communal moments are held lightly and optionally for the sake of preserving each artist's autonomy while allowing organic connection amongst residents.

This autumn our Grounding Residency runs at Cove Park, our longstanding partner in Helensburgh. The residency gathers a cohort of seven artists, five selected through our first open call, with each artist allocated an individual pod and personal studio space allocated according to their practices.

Artists who join our residencies stay within our ecology. Past residents have gone on to feature in our programmes, sit on selection panels for residency open calls and become artist fellows.

Past residencies have been supported by Creative Scotland, Cove Park, Glasgow International and the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow.

Sign up to our mailing list and follow us on socials for information on future open calls.

For Grounding Residency 2026, we engaged with an external panel consisted of the following individuals, all of whom we deeply value:

Dr. Ranjana Thapalyal – An inter-disciplinary artist and writer, based in Scotland. Her practice spans ceramics, painting, collaborative performance, poetry and critical writing. Her research has focussed on concepts of ‘self’ in South Asian and West African traditions, cultural politics and the development of decolonising, anti-racist strategies for art pedagogy.

Tilda Williams-Kelly – A Scottish painter and visual artist based in Stirling. Her work centres on the study of figure, light, colour, and environment within oil and mixed-media painting. While grounded in traditional oil techniques, she integrates life drawing and outdoor sketching with mark-making, abstraction, and imagination.

Tamsin Hong – A contemporary international art curator working at Serpentine, London. Her intersectional research interests draw from her upbringing on unceded Ngunnawal Country on the land now known as Australia and include feminism, women’s knowledge systems, embodied practices, re-indigenising approaches and decoloniality.

Grounding Residency 2026 Cohort

  • Izzy Jones-Rigby

    Izzy Jones-Rigby is a Costumier working in theatre, screen, and beyond. Her freelance work has allowed her to stretch her creativity while deepening her hunger to understand a garment’s construction and how it can shape a character. She hopes to shift her focus from the end product to the process itself.

  • Kozyeli

    Kozyeli provides the function with hip-hop tunes that encourage and inspire authenticity in oneself, positivity, transparency, alchemy and open-mindedness. These ideals reflect in their flow, word play, and beat selection. Expect sparkly melodies, big boy drums, big girl bars and big energy.

  • Mawadduh

    Mawadduh is a singer-songwriter producer based in Scotland. Her practice blends Eastern and Western musical traditions, creating a soulful sound rooted in neo-soul and R&B that explores themes of identity, diaspora, and belonging.

    Her music releases centre on her 2025 debut EP HomeSick, a deeply personal project featuring tracks such as The Move, alongside additional singles released through late 2025 on streaming platforms and Bandcamp.

  • Masa Nazzal

    Masa Nazzal is an organizer and researcher focused on community education and border abolition. Through writing, sound, and embroidery, she explores how borders shape lived experience while imagining borderless futures and the political possibilities of inhabiting worlds beyond systems of restriction and control.

  • Katalina Watt

    Katalina Watt is the author of instant Sunday Times Bestselling novel Saltswept (2026, Hodderscape). They were selected for a 2025 Literature Matters Award from Royal Society of Literature, and AIR Literature UNESCO 2024 Writer in Residence for Konstkollektivet in Sweden. They were a finalist for 2023 Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine as founding Audio Director for khōréō. They are a Writing Coach at The Novelry and represented by Christabel McKinley at David Higham Associates.

  • Srija Shrestha

    Srija Shrestha is a Nepali artist and illustrator based in Scotland. Her work explores themes of home, belonging, identity and emotional well-being through the medium of illustrations, comics, zines and cyanotype prints while also incorporating Nepali vocabulary. Her projects are often community-based driven by primary research, conversations and interviews.

  • Sequoia Danielle Barnes

    Sequoia Danielle Barnes (b. 1989) is a black, multidisciplinary artist. She grew up in Mobile, Alabama. Her main mediums are clay, textiles, and illustration. Her work has been shown at Orleans House Gallery, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Centre for Contemporary Art - Glasgow, Edinburgh Art Festival, Fruitmarket, and Tramway. She received her PhD in Design from Edinburgh College of Art at the University of Edinburgh. She also holds a MA in History of Design and Material Culture from the University of Brighton, a MS in Fashion Studies with certification in museum studies from the University of Delaware, and a BA in Studio Art (ceramic sculpture) from Spring Hill College.

Past Artist Residents

  • Frankie Mulholland

    ARTIST

    Frankie Mulholland (she/they) is an artist working with the mediums of movement, visual art and sound. Through these mediums, her work interrogates identity, time, intimacy and dance as a form of healing. She believes in the importance of connection and the shared experience of dance and music we have in club spaces. Clubs as a potential space of sanctuary and protection for queer communities and how movement and sound can be used as a transformative tool and one for healing.

    She has been involved in events in Glasgows club scene since 2015 & were one of the Co-op board members of the queer workers space Bonjour Glasgow, a member of House Ball Scotland, recipient of the 2021 #LoveDanceScotland.

  • Black and white photos of a woman's face, arranged in a grid on a white background.

    Kialy Tihngang

    VISUAL ARTIST

    Kialy Tihngang (she/her) works in video, sculpture, textiles, animation and photomontage, typically involving elaborate sets, costumes, graphics, props, and collaborations with performers and musicians. As a British-born Cameroonian, her research-based practice focuses on colonial European misrepresentation, extraction, and demonisation of West African cultural practices, but also on her own misremembering, misreading, and romanticisation of said practices, primarily by designing artefacts from reimagined histories and speculated futures. Through combining the dark humour of Nollywood with the aesthetics of retrofuturism and the visual language of Western mass media, Kialy explores Blackness, queerness, Britishness, and the crushing structural oppressions surrounding these identities.

  • A woman with braided hair wearing earrings and a black button-up shirt, standing against a plain white wall.

    Gaïa

    SINGER

    Gaïa (she/they) is a jazz and rnb singer based here in Glasgow. Their practice revolves around several collaborative projects within to the Neo-jazz scene in Glasgow raging from rnb projects to spiritual jazz projects as well. She has really evolved over the last year working amongst different scenes being able to work collaboratively with different musicians, poets etc.

  • A man smiling and holding a glass of champagne, wearing a striped shirt, a black hat, and various bracelets, standing against a dark background.

    Tatenda

    ARTIST

    Tatenda (she/they) is an artist of the palate. With a background in cheese and wine, she focuses on sustainable ancestral methods of food production and the process that transform flavours within and between food. She uses storytelling approach as an accessible way to share knowledge whilst using our senses to reconnect to our bodies.

  • A black and white photo of a person walking through a grassy landscape with large hills or mountains in the background. The person is wearing traditional clothing and earrings, holding a piece of cloth over their shoulder.

    Najma Hussein Abukar

    VISUAL ARTIST

    Najma Hussein Abukar (she/her) is a Somali born, Glasgow-based photographer documenting cultural and immigrant experiences. Passionate about curating, archiving, and re (focusing) narratives of those underrepresented and marginalised. Her artistic practice is concerned with issues of identity, (self) representation and the notion of home and belonging within the Scottish landscape.

  • A joyful woman with short hair and glasses, wearing colorful earrings and a patterned jacket with a beige top, smiling widely.

    Salma Francoise Faraji

    MOVEMENT ARTIST

    Originally from Tanzania, East Africa, based in Glasgow, Salma (she/her) has taught and performed with multi-generational communities in Scotland. She perused a career as an Air Traffic Control Assistant, prior to volunteering in South America as a Human Rights Ambassador. She teaches Aerobics with Soul ® The African Dance Workout, and continues studying British Sign Language. Facing barriers has empowered me as a Dance Artist; being vulnerable, honest, and unafraid. She embraces opportunities to work with the community as an invaluable understanding and continuous evaluation, finding both nourishment and challenges along the way. She is passionate about sharing time with people, whilst learning and being inspired.

  • A woman with curly white hair and headphones is DJing at a club, standing behind a professional DJ setup with turntables and a mixer, illuminated by blue and purple lighting.

    Plantainchipps

    DJ AND MUSIC PRODUCER

    Plantainchipps (she/her) is all about upbeat and fast-paced sounds, music that uplifts and excites. She keeps it energetic, multidimensional, and firmly rooted on the dancefloor with selections including Afrobeats, R'n'B, house and dancehall. Plantainchipps has played a variety of gigs around Glasgow including The Berkley Suite, The Art School and Stereo, and supported artists such as Peach, Shygirl, Bonaventure, Lorraine James and Jamz Supernova. She has self-released track ‘Snap’, which was added to the Huntley + Palmer’s ‘ClydeBuilt 5.0 Compilation.’ Under her own name, Nwanneka has released some bass-laden and dreamy pop cuts, including hypnotising single 'Soil' produced by Mark Hoise.

  • A woman with dark skin and multiple colorful beaded bracelets on her arm smiling with her eyes closed and making a peace sign with her fingers. She is wearing a patterned jacket, a graphic t-shirt, a beaded headscarf, and layered necklaces, standing against a plain dark background.

    p a t s y

    CREATIVE ENTREPRENEUR

    p a t s y (she/her) is a creative entrepreneur, based in Glasgow. A multifaceted individual who found BAMILEK; an independent concept store whose mission is to connect the African Diaspora. She spends a lot of her time capturing life moments through photos, videos + audio, comprising them using mixed media on her youtube channel + film/photography business; Captured By A Friend. Amongst all that, she also is a hair stylist providing protective hair care services through Hair By A Friend. As a creative p a t s y works with variety of mediums such as dance, graphics, abstract art and those previously mentioned. She is an emerging artist hoping to pioneer change within the creative industry in Scotland.

  • Close-up of a young woman with curly hair and freckles, wearing a white shirt and a hoop earring, standing in a greenhouse with green plants and glass roof in the background.

    Tilda Williams-Kelly

    VISUAL ARTIST

    Tilda Williams-Kelly (she/her, b.1999) is a Scottish painter and visual artist based in Stirling whose work centres the study of figure, light, colour and environment within a context of oil and mixed-media painting. While utilising traditional oil techniques, Tilda blends life drawing and outdoor sketching with mark making, abstraction and imagination. 

    Working with acrylic, spray paint, and charcoal, she creates vibrant works responding to observation and intimacy. Tilda is interested in alchemaic phenomena within the act of painting that devotes to manipulating properties to create works that both allude to and transcend nature. 

    Tilda’s practice also involves writing, her undergraduate dissertation titled Sister Painter, Misogynoir, Intersectionality and Black British Women’s Painting2022, a Boom Graduate Publication is available in most online book stores. Tilda received the Graham Laing Award for Excellence in Painting and Sculpture in 2022, and is part of the Hospitalfield Graduate Residency Programme 2023 - 24.

    Follow Tilda's work on her Instagram and  website.

  • A woman with dark skin, wearing sunglasses and large earrings, dressed in a patterned African print dress, standing outdoors in a green hilly landscape with rocks and a pond, under a blue sky with scattered clouds.

    ELANDA

    DJ & PRODUCER

    ELANDA is a journey for a deeper connection to her heritage and to forge healing and connectivity for all through the power of sound.

    ELANDA is a DJ & producer from Zimbabwe now residing in Birmingham after making herself heard in the music scene across Scotland with her percussive and intoxicatingly hypotonic melodic style. She has had some of her productions and mixes featured on BBC Radio One. She holds a bi-monthly residency at La Cheetah Club, Glasgow for "STFU!" where she invites you to ground yourself on the dance floor by embodying your personal expression through the exploration of bass music.

    In February 2024 she released her debut track "Glasgow Stint" under Glasgow's Redstone Press Label for the "Feeling Everything, At Once" in Support of Scottish Action for Mental Health (SAMH). She also released "Bunda Bop" ft Mod-R through Livery Street Social Club which has been played on BBC Radio One several times.

    Follow Zvikomborero's work via Instagram and Soundcloud.

  • Two young women standing in front of a graffiti-covered wall.

    Rico Ibrahim

    ARTIST & CREATIVE DIRECTOR

    Photography by Andrew Martin. Featuring Robert Moses and Esther Olowe. Rico Ibrahim creative director and assistant stylist Daryl Butler!

    Hello! My name is Rico Ibrahim; I am currently the Creative Director and Co-founder of Anri, a magazine for Black and PoC creatives. I am also currently in my 3rd of studying Forensic Science at UWS. I was also a dancer at RCS and Dance Base Scotland previously; however, I've decided to close that chapter of my life.

  • A woman with short blonde hair sitting against a plain light-colored wall.

    Anoushka Nanguy

    MUSICAN

    Anoushka, known as Noushy, is a jazz trombonist, vocalist, composer and arranger from Glasgow, Scotland.

    In-demand session musician; as well as leading her own bands, the NooVision and co- leading the hip hop-jazz collective, Astrosnax. She often plays with other bands – KOKOROKO, corto.alto, Josef Akin, aswell as the Nu Civilisation Orchestra and SNJO. Noushy was the recipient of the Rising Star Award in the 2020 Scottish Jazz Awards.