Visiting Artist Studio
Our visiting artist studio 12.53m sq. with one window looking out on the main Barracks square. The studio has power sockets, access to Wi-Fi, dimmable spotlights and an electric radiator. Visiting artists have access to the shared kitchen, designated wet working space and accessible toilet. The studios are fully accessible including a ramped entrance and access to the studios is available daily between 6am and 12 midnight. Due to the listed status of the building, artists whose practice requires hot works (i.e use of kilns, welding materials for example) or practices that require ventilation (i.e result in dust or use spray paints) are not suitable for these studios. Hire charges for the visiting artist studio start from £10 per day. Contact us at artiststudios@maltingsberwick.co.uk for more information.
Emily Cropton
Emily Cropton is a multi-disciplinary artist and landscape architect working with sculpture, installation, walking and performance. Her work engages with rural contexts and is responsive to places and communities. Emily often works by hand using gathered, found, inherited and gifted materials, and is interested in how the act of making can help us access different forms of knowledge and understanding. Her current work explores the making and remaking of the landscape through processes of production, erosion and restoration, and how these cycles map onto the human body. Last year Emily undertook a residency with the Maltings and Newcastle University working with sheep farming and conservation communities in rural Northumberland and she is also a qualified Mountain Leader.
Jo Thomas
Jo Thomas’ practice is rooted in the relationship with place, season, and the more-than-human world. Weaving wisdom and messages from her local landscape of coastal Northumberland and working with handmade plant inks and natural pigments, she creates oracle-style works on paper that explore belonging and inter-species communication. Her process is deeply responsive to her wild and urban encounters, often using native trees and common weeds such as oak, nettle, and mugwort as both material, guide and collaborator. Formerly a textile and surface designer working with natural dyes, Jo now focuses on embodied, ecological art-making that weaves together craft, ritual, and Earth stewardship. Jo recently undertook a residency with the Land Art Collective in Dartmoor and regularly teaches creative and land-based workshops that invite others into reciprocal connection with nature and has also completed a natural ink-making project supported by Create Berwick which culminated in a day workshop for local creatives.
Joel Arnstein
Joel is an abstract painter based in Berwick-upon-Tweed and is currently working on a series of acrylic and oil works inspired by the town’s environment. To create the works, Joel divides the canvas into a grid related to the intervals between prime numbers to provide a rhythm. Colours and forms are then added to make each work individual while retaining a familiar link to other works in the series. Each abstract is given a title as a key to the work but not to overly restrict a viewer’s thoughts. For Joel, the work should stimulate new thoughts and feelings in viewers each time they see it. Joel has recently shown works at Artoluso Galley, Berwick-upon-Tweed and was commissioned for the public artwork ‘Hand’ at Croydon Foyer Building, Surrey. He is also the author and illustrator of the International Dictionary of Graphic Symbols.
Tania Willis
Tania has worked across most of the traditional areas of illustration and design, as well as some less traditional ones—including airline liveries, banknote design, and event design—much of which she undertook during the 25 years she lived in Hong Kong. Her travels unsurprisingly inspired a love of mapmaking, a discipline she now specialises in. After returning to the UK ten years ago, she discovered new opportunities to collaborate with heritage partners and placemaking agencies on interpretation and cartography. Tania uses visual communication to help people engage with destination and heritage experiences. Although her maps are designed to guide users through (sometimes) complex locations, she also uses storytelling to heighten the sense of place and time beyond purely traditional cartography. Her work is information design disguised as illustration. As an educator, she has taught at a variety of universities and art colleges in the UK, Asia, and the US. She also co-founded and runs The Good Ship Illustration, an online education resource based in Berwick, but connecting with illustrators all over the world.
Kathryn Elkin
Kathryn Elkin is an artist working primarily with moving image, voice, writing and performance. She is currently undertaking a practice-based PhD at Northumbria University that investigates the legacies of the broadcasting ban in the North of Ireland. Her research attempts to make material the violent phenomena that occur within transcription and overdubbing of voice within video news footage, as well as the sensory and networked memories of this period of censorship. Her video work is distributed by Lux and she has had solo exhibitions at CCA Glasgow, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh and Lux, London amongst others. Her work has been screened at London Film Festival, UnionDocs, New York and Courtisane Festival, Ghent.
The studios have been funded by Northumberland County Council, the UK Shared Prosperity Fund, the North East Combined Authority, Create Berwick and the Cultural Development Fund. The Cultural Development Fund is a Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) fund administered by Arts Council England.