Image: IMPACT12 opening procession from City Hall Bristol, led by resident artists the State of Print with the Sambistas band.
UWE Bristol’s Centre for Print Research (CFPR) presents a truly exciting opportunity for collaboration and the enrichment of the CFPR’s research activities.
Artists and designers will make a body of work that contributes to the CFPR archive and the editions portfolio. They will bring a curiosity and range of interests in areas such as fine art, print, product design, robotics, electronics, software, manufacturing, and materials science, encouraging new and productive research partnerships. As well as producing a body of work, resident artists will deliver a range of inspiring talks and participative sessions to our researchers and student community.
Carinna Parraman, Director of CFPR commented:
“We had an amazing summer of residencies coinciding with the IMPACT 12 multidisciplinary printmaking conference. Resident artists the State of Print, Rodrigo Arteaga and Tracy Hill delivered fantastic keynote presentations, and we were able to employ interns from UWE’s Fine Art and Illustration undergraduate courses to support the artists.
We were very excited to collaborate on resident artist exhibitions with our city partners: the School of Art and Design, Arnolfini and Spike Print Studio, and look forward to working together more as the programme progresses.”
The current artists in residencies include:
Rodrigo Arteaga
Rodrigo is a Chilean artist who completed a MFA in Sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art in 2018. His practice is concerned with the complex relationship between nature, culture and representation. His interest in working across different areas of thought has led him to collaborate with specialists in fields such as Microbiology, Bio-Fabrication, Mycology, Natural History, Botany, and Architecture.
State of Print
The State Of Print (SOP) is a proposition; it is an evolving visual declaration initiated by a collective of artists beguiled and amused at the catastrophe of current social and political thinking and the comedy of established systems of governance. The artists have therefore elected to cast adrift on a nonsense of their own (print)making—a makeshift non-geographical region built upon a fluid statute of ink and a constitutional raft of recycled cardboard. The intention has been to explore the current state of nations through the proposition that everything that formalises a nation state is printed – currency, maps, laws, passports, governance, news and information, cultures, doctrines and communications and so on.
Tracy Hill
Tracy Hill studied Fine Art at Bournville School of Art, Birmingham, Sheffield Hallam University and The University of Central Lancashire, Preston. She is the joint research lead of the Artlab Contemporary Print Studios at the University of Central Lancashire, which tests the relevance of printmaking in contemporary, mainstream art by innovation and expanding print practice through a process of continuing collaborative dialogues with artists. Her cross-disciplinary practice investigates and reconsiders the relationship between our developing digital capabilities and the aesthetics of the traditional hand created mark.
Matt Smith
Matt explores how history is a constantly selected and refined narrative that presents itself as a fixed and accurate account of the past. Using techniques of institutional critique and artist intervention, his work investigates how museums can be reframed from an outsider, often LGBTQ, perspective by taking objects and repurposing them in new situations, or creating ‘lost objects’. Solo shows have included Queering the Museum (2010) at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Flux: Parian Unpacked (2018) at the Fitzwilliam Museum and Losing Venus (2020-2022) at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. In 2016 Matt was awarded an AHRC funded practice-based PhD from the University of Brighton exploring the intersection of contemporary art practice and queer identities. From 2017-2022 Matt was Professor of Craft at Konstfack University in Stockholm and in 2016 was artist-in-residence at the V&A where he explored how historic figurines could address questions of representation within the museum. His residency at the CFPR will build on this work.
View the full current artist residencies.