Artist in Residence
2022- Heidi Nikolaiesen
This summer Heidi Nikolaiesen joined us for a two-month residency funded through ‘Sustain’, a two-year programme by Castlefield Gallery and Aarhus Center for Visual Art focussing on artist exchange, professional development and developing low carbon and ecologically aware ways of producing and experiencing art. Castlefield Gallery’s programme includes a series of digital workshops, talks, visits, critical feedback and professional support focussed on low carbon art making.
Heidi is a visual artist and independent researcher whose work includes text, sculptural objects and installations. Her work seeks to activate a sense of agency to digital and technological concepts by using foraged plant fibers and earth materials, objet trouve, archive material and sculpted objects in combination to articulate a critical and free relationship to these. Her work imagines a new strategy of activist holism. A holism that recognizes that living with the big discrepancies of today’s society - the fields of economy, technology and climate seeming like irreconcilable hyperobjects - we must try to think these together in meditative, nurturing and spiritual relational ways.
Website guide created by Heidi Nikolaiesen during her residency in collaboration with Sophie King outlining how to build an environmentally friendly website.
“During my residency I have worked on a number of projects, some of which are finished and others only getting started. I’ve had the pleasure of deepening my working relationship with a great Manchester based artist, Sophy King from Rogue studios. Together we have researched how to lower carbon emissions on websites and created the publication "Hosted Gray - a Low-carbon Artists Website Guide", a resource made especially with artists in mind. I hope many artists will embrace, be inspired by and make use of it. Guides can be found at Paradise Works, Castlefield Gallery and Rogue Studios.” - Heidi Nikolaiesen
Heidi studied Comparative Literature at Copenhagen University and holds a MFA from Funen Art Academy. She has participated in various volunteer labor camps and activist cultural exchange projects in Estonia, Cuba and the US. While living and studying in Moscow she has visited the spiritual island of Olkhon in Siberia, has been on a Vipassana silent retreat and done gardening work at a buddhist center in Somerset England. Since 2021 she has been based in Aarhus as part of the studio collective Corporum, an artist’ organization and studio collective working for better working conditions for artists of which she is the chairperson.
SUSTAIN is supported by Creative Industries Trafford, the Danish Arts Foundation and Manchester City Council.
2021 - Deshna Shah
Our 2021 Artist Residency has been awarded to Deshna Shah, a recent BFA graduate from the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford. Joining Paradise Works in July, Deshna has been exploring the local Jain population in Salford and Greater Manchester. The work created will be shared over Open Studios this November.
Based in Manchester and Oxford, Deshna has a complex relationship to location, culture and belonging. She uses her work to question the residual impacts of relocation, judgment and the unspoken, especially within the South Asian diaspora. Deshna lives with dyslexia, to overcome the restrictions of modern language she combines languages from her childhood; Hindi, Gujarati, and English to form the enigmatic alphabet The Twilight Language, which she uses to narrate personal and social stories. Her practice is designed to help others heal through participation and visual imagery. Deshna’s work fluidly meets at the crossroads of installation, dance, performance, filmmaking, new media, and critical theory.
2019 - Gregory Herbert
Spilled Fertiliser and Leftover Seeds by Gregory Herbert.
Gregory Herbert is a Liverpool based artist and former director of The Royal Standard, Liverpool. Recently graduating from an MA in Fine Art from the Manchester School of Art, Herbert has exhibited internationally, notable exhibits include ‘The Cucumber Fell in the Sand’ at Humber Street Gallery, Hull (2019); ‘Oikos Logos’, at Enclave Lab, London (2018) and ‘Phase-Shift’, Montreal, Canada (2017).
Joining us as an artist in residence in 2019, Hebert developed the new work in response to the area and context surrounding Paradise Works. During his residency Herbert was influenced by models of collaboration and coexistence, exploring the vast entanglement of interactions between organisms and their environment. Herbert started a larger research project into support structures, whilst using the symbiotic relationship between fungi and the roots of plants as influence in a sculptural amalgamation of ideas and aesthetics. We were delighted to share his sculpture ‘Spilled Fertiliser and Leftover Seeds’ made during his residency over Open Studios 2019.
2018 - Danielle Swindells
Stills from Lot 86, a short film made by Danielle Swindells in response to her residency at Paradise Works.
Danielle Swindells is an artist and filmmaker based in Manchester. She makes work that develops observations of isolated communities, the landscape and man-made structures that contain them. Her work explores the relationship between people and place; specifically sites that are maintained on memory and nostalgia. Working with video, she uses an explorative process where a narrative emerges through her experience of place and the unfolding relationship between her and inhabitants.
Awarded a place as an artist in residence in 2018, Danielle Swindells created Lot 86 in response to the surrounding area and community around Paradise Works. Undergoing research for the project during summer, her final film was screened in October as part Paradise Works Open Studios 2018.
Lot 86 follows the story of Victoria Theatre, located 10 minutes away from Paradise Works. The last building of its kind in Lower Broughton, Victoria Theatre has survived the swathes of demolition across Salford since the 1960s. After being left to rot for a decade, it was finally put up for auction. Swindells follows its final few weeks and a small group of individuals who attempt to reclaim it as the last tangible link to their past.
Watch Lot 86 here
2017 - Michelle Shields
Organised Labour - The past, present & future of the production site.
Michelle Shields was born in Salford and attended the Royal College of Art, London. She has exhibited internationally and her work is held in public and private collections. Michelle often works in interdisciplinary environments and is currently part of Makers Dozen, a collective of twelve creatives from different disciplines. Shields has taught at Manchester School of Art, and conducted workshops at Salford University, The Royal College of Art & Ruthin Craft Centre.
Joining us in 2017 Shields’ sculptural works, installations and objects responded to the industrial past of the Greengate area of Salford. Using metal wire, industrial enamel, ceramics, found materials, models and drawings Shields referenced the factories & manufacturers which formerly populated the surrounding area, with particular focus on the Anaconda Wire Works that was sited beside Paradise Works at one time. Her works can be understood as open experimental arrangements, or the preliminary findings, of a series of associations to the area's reinvention after its long standing contribution to the Industrial Revolution.