ESW/ECA Graduate Residents 2024

We are delighted to announce that the four artists selected for this year’s ESW/ECA Graduate Residency Award are Imogen Lee Allen, Iona Peterson, Callum Watt and Molly Wickett.

They will be in residence at ESW for three months from January – April 2024 developing new work. Residents will be provided with ongoing technical, curatorial support and mentorship from the ESW team. They will have access to ESW’s production faculties and training to help them develop new skills with a grant of £500 to produce new work. There will be opportunities for them to connect with the ESW membership and Edinburgh’s community of artists to enable them to develop their networks and establish their career.

Imogen Lee Allen is a queer, Scottish artist, currently based in Edinburgh. Working mainly with sculpture, she employs a varied and diverse approach. This includes, but is not limited to working with reclaimed objects, natural materials, metalwork, woodwork and printmaking. Her art practice exists as a coalescence of people, place, environments, structures and conversations – assembled from a scattered state to create a whole. Lee Allen seeks to interpret systems and structures; exploring the environmental, social, and institutional workings of daily life to investigate how individual experiences are inextricably linked with greater social and historical contexts.

ECA Degree Show, 2023. Steel welded metal frame, plasma-cut signs, burnt wooden logs, chain, burnt wooden repurposed boards, printed acetate, found (abandoned) road signs, melted plastic with vinyl text, digitally printed fabric, moss, leaves, ivy.

Iona Peterson’s practice explores connections between the human and non-human through examining processes of community building, societal structures, and relationship to the land.  They are currently focused on shifting social concepts of ‘remoteness’ and strange things that can transpire in ‘remote’ spaces. They are an intermedia artist whose material process is largely based in and inspired by nature, working with sound recordings, found and natural materials, and ceramics. Social engagement is also at the core of their practice. They have also co-curated several exhibitions over their time at the ECA including Spaced (a response to the lack of exhibition space during the Covid pandemic), C.youthere (a celebration of sculpture), and, most recently, Queer as Muck. Their curatorial practice runs alongside their art practice and is central to exploring themes of community.

Achosnich/Field of Sighing Wind, artificial grass, 55 X 55 cm, 2023

Callum Watt is a recent graduate from Intermedia at ECA. He works primarily in the space between 2D and 3D to explore and express the sculptural nature of language. Often oscillating between contrasting mediums, methods, and materials, his practice is strongly informed by processes of production, and the material history of written communication.

Image Description 

Untitled (Held), 2023 Silicone, sandpaper, steel tensioning wire, concrete. 

Molly Wickett’s large-scale sculptures seek to reconcile the microcosm and the macrocosm, where the relationship between small-scale and delicate forms composes the whole. Reflective of the work’s engagement with ecology, this narrative is expanded through a queer and disabled lens. Natural, site-specific materials degrade alongside constructed, experimental ones to underscore the tension in the duration of care. The fragile tension between hope and collapse underpins her entire artistic practice.

If I listen Closely, I Can Hear the Sky Falling Too, 2023, Elm, pine, local grasses, soil, salt, steel, aluminium, lichens, sand, water and ash.