British artist and academic Becky Shaw has been selected from over 150 applicants to become our new artist-in-residence. Becky will be working from the practice for the next few months, working towards a final outcome for our exhibition in October.

Becky makes time-based works that critically explore the relationship between the individual and the social, and that attempt to capture the scale and complexity of social and material relationships. Current or recent works include ‘How Deep is your Love?’ a commission for the City of Calgary, Alberta, exploring Calgarian’s emotional attachment to their water infrastructure. This included commissioning the City to make a child-size version of an industrial leak location tool. ‘Hiding in Plain Sight’ was commissioned by the Cultural Institute/Kings College London. Becky worked with nursing and midwifery researchers, playing hide-and-seek in a simulated learning environment as a way to understand how we construct, and are constructed by, our surroundings. Both these works build on previous works at Grizedale Arts, ICIA University of Bath, New Art Gallery Walsall, Kunstprijs Amstelveen, Age Concern, In Certain Places and Sculpture Space Utica.

On her appointment, Becky says “I am delighted to be given the opportunity to be artist in residence at SWA and am keen to explore how the practice and the people within it work to produce types of social, emotional, and physical warmth and comfort, whist negotiating complex social, material and political terrains.” She will be developing a series of speculative works that seek to maintain a sensation of liveness and open-endedness within the exhibition. Sarah Wigglesworth explains “We were immediately impressed with Becky’s poetic approach to what is traditionally considered as the purely practical. For example we loved her recent work exploring the emotional attachment of the citizens of Calgary to their water infrastructure which included a child-size version of an industrial leak location tool. We are excited to be hosting Becky in our office over the coming three months and fascinated to see the results.”

In addition to working for the next three months at the practice, Becky is also currently working on an interdisciplinary project exploring the construction of ‘oddness’ and difference in school. She completed a practice-based PhD in 1998, working with Marie Curie Cancer Care and is Reader in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University.