Artists in Residence

Audrey Grant

Our Artist in Residence for the academic year 2023-24 is Audrey Grant. Audrey is an award-winning painter whose practice includes drawing, photography, and site-specific installation. Grant’s work is underpinned by intellectual ideas derived from, and inspired by, poetry, literature, and philosophy.

Audrey’s work will focus on the ancient Airthrey Estate where the University is located. Historic buildings, now ruinous, remain in this landscape within the lush Hermitage woods on the periphery of the modern University estate. Of the woods, she states that she will consider ‘the immensity of the forest and the hermit’s hut as a centre of concentrated solitude’: of the old and dilapidated cottages on campus ‘the house as an embodiment of dreams that collects and contains the past, present and future’: and of Logie Kirk and its ancient predecessor ‘the significance of the ruin’.

Audrey’s inspiration within the Art Collection theme of the year 2023/2024 ‘Campus as Inspiration’, includes ‘found sculptural environment and metaphorical palimpsest of the past, present and future’; ‘as a grounding to cultivate the poetical imagination, and the realms we inhabit indoors, outdoors and within the psyche’. Relooking at these ancient spaces and interpreting them artistically will constitute an innovative departure for the Art Collection and will encourage people to explore the landscape and take new inspiration from the campus itself.

Visit Audrey's website.

Audrey sitting on a bench in a garden with a tree behind them

Jennifer Wicks

In 2022, Jennifer Wicks looked at the work of Norman McLaren, held in the University Archive and the Art Collection, exploring his pioneering innovations with sound and image.

McLaren’s interests lay in the visual translation of music, the phenomenology of sound, and image, and the philosophy around perception; one of his underlying concerns was movement, “movement that is drawn, not drawings that move”. He also drew directly onto the soundtrack of the film to create an innovative sort of electronic, optical-graphical music, he essentially produced sound out of drawings. Alongside his hand-drawn films, he experimented with stereoscopic films and drawings and went on to work with dancers and choreographers.

The residency was generously supported by Creative Scotland and allowed Jennifer to develop a new body of work exploring themes surrounding sound and image, the materiality of film and visualising music. This work culminated in an exhibition entitled Technical Notes.

Jenny Wicks

Alan Dimmick

Anniversary Photographer in Residence 

Alan Dimmick was the Artist in Residence 2017-2018. The project was a 12-month photography residency during the course of the University’s 50th anniversary year.  Aligned to the anniversary calendar, the photographer’s brief was to capture a ‘Portrait of the Campus and the era’ in contrast with 1967-8, exploring the unique natural, built and human environment of the University.

Dimmick is fascinated by the everyday social and cultural life of Scotland and has created a unique visual resource of documentary significance which was exhibited in GOMA in 2013.  In 2017 he exhibited his body of work at Stills Gallery in Edinburgh. 

The University Art Collection was eager that this project recorded the modern history of the University.  Whilst the University archive and art collection holds a collection of fine photographs from the early days of the University in the 1960s and 70s, relatively little had been done to document and explore the changing physical and human landscape of the campus in recent decades. The Photographer has contributed to redressing this balance.

All images now form part of the University archive, creating a rich artistic, contemporary record of the rhythm of life on campus, bringing up to date the historic photographic material already held in our collections.

Visit Alan's website.

Alan Dimmick

Ally Wallace

Ally Wallace worked as Artist in Residence at the University of Stirling’s Pathfoot Building 2016-2017 on a self-initiated project made possible by a Creative Scotland grant. He made work focused on Pathfoot’s modernist architecture in relation to the art collection housed in it, the surrounding landscape and the people who use the building.

View more of Ally's work on his website.

Ally Wallace