Silence Awareness Existence Program Linda Price-Sneddon Pittsburgh, PA, USA Painting, Video Installation www "Art that compels folk to slow down, observe and think is truly subversive in this instant gratification attention economy." I'm deeply intrigued by the relationship between landscape and psyche. As living beings, we are shaped by the lands where we are born and live. As creatures of language, we imbue the land with emotional and symbolic meaning—whether it's a spectacular sunrise, a brooding sky, or a majestic mountain. My work explores the ways landscape reflects our inner lives. Liminality—a threshold between two conditions or states of being—is central to my practice as I explore the space between binaries. I think of my work as existing in a liminal space between waking and dreaming, a place where forms emerge and dissolve. Motifs of mountain, water, and cloud become emblems for my exploration of Form/Formlessness, Time/Timelessness, Stasis/Flux. My oil paintings are inspired by nature's forms, rhythms, and patterns, both macro and micro. Through layered color relationships, I explore color as energy, color as flux. I work with the emergent physics of paint—color embodied—to evoke the visceral experience of encountering both our physical and emotional worlds. Ultimately, my work invites an attentive form of seeing—one that might extend into how we encounter the world beyond the artwork. Nahelli Chavoya Guadalajara, Mexico / Ireland Poetry, Dance, Installation art www I am a poet who creates through movement. Mainly through walks in nature, dancing, and a slow contemplation of movement, where I can connect with the different times that inhabit a place. I am a poet who constantly loses language, and collects in her body many unuttered poems, and sometimes makes a house for them to share them with others: art, words, dances. Sometimes they visit. Mieke Loubser Cape Town, South Africa Drawing, Painting, Text-based art www My name is Mieke and I’m a multidisciplinary creative and freelancer based in Cape Town, South Africa. I grew up in a small desert town in Namibia, but moved to the city in 2008 and have been there ever since. In 2017, I was awarded my BA in Fine Art from the University of Cape Town, where I majored in painting, and in 2021 I received my BA Hons in Visual Arts Illustration from the University of Stellenbosch. I currently work as wardrobe stylist and fashion assistant in Cape Town's film and television industry, but have begun to re-prioritize my practice with the intention of returning it it full time. I am endeavouring to reconnect with my creative voice and through this, deepen my understanding of myself as an artist, a painter, a poet and a person.

February Marc Schmidt Netherlands Film, Writing, Academic Research www My work is rooted in an interest in consciousness: how we perceive the world around us and our place within it. In this, I seek the intersection where abstract ideas take shape in lived reality. Film is my main way of entering that space. In my documentary films, I explore mental states in their full intimacy, and reflect on them: a friend struggling with autism and the external world (Matthew’s Laws), the possibility of understanding another species (The Chimpanzee Complex), and, in my most personal work yet, the fear and attraction of emptiness (How to Disappear Completely). Currently, my practice centers on the perception of time: how it stretches, fractures, or dissolves in different mental states. Through doctoral research on the narrative structures of psychotic experiences, and through the development of a new film on trauma and dissociation, I search for forms that can hold experiences that slip beyond linearity. How do stories take shape when time itself begins to falter? Warren Ward Mullumbimby, Australia Writing, Literature, Cultural History www "Writing about European cultural history" I am a psychiatrist and psychotherapist who writes about philosophy and cultural history. My first book, Lovers of Philosophy, explored how the love lives of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault and Derrida shaped their ideas. My second book, Salonnières, traces the history of the literary salon in Europe, and the role played by progenitors such as George Sand, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf. On this visit to Arteles, I'll be working on my third book, Quantum Love, which explores the love lives of seven theoretical physicists including Curie, Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg. In this work I'll be contemplating the interplay between so-called inanimate objects (protons, electrons, quarks) and animate phenomena such as consciousness and desire. I am fascinated by the way ideas evolve, whether these ideas are scientific, philosophical, theological or literary. I also love reading and writing about art and the history of art. Philosophically, I am drawn to the more creative and iconoclastic thinkers of the continental tradition. I also love playing music, immersing myself in nature and exploring somatic experiences such as sauna, cold water, yoga and breath work. Rona Figueroa New York, USA Acting, Singing, Songwriting, Writing www "Living with a song in my heart" I'm an actor, singer, songwriter, writer, visual artist. In everything I do, I aim for joy, playfulness and collaboration. As an actor I like tuning into what an audience brings to the room, including their rhythms and sensitivities with the play onstage, then tailoring my rhythms in response so that we are all alive and in sync together, in a constant dance of giving and receiving. As a songwriter, writer and visual artist, dreams are often my co-creator, and as such have taught me to forgo superficial expectations, to allow the mundane and seemingly easy conclusions. Dreams gift gems too: plot twists, unique wordplay, sublime visuals. Hi or lo-fi, dreams always surprise. In all cases, I am a reed, happy to serve the story, the song, and images that want to manifest. I am reminded that the creative force is channelled from beyond myself. Likewise, cultivating dialogue with the community, visible and invisible, makes me feel integrated with the big, big picture.

Puja Nandi London, UK Writing Puja is a writer, DJ and public law lawyer. She was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize 2024 and has had other short stories published in Chicken + Bread Magazine. She also writes about music and film, with work published in The Quietus, Filmhounds Magazine and The Line of Best Fit. In her creative writing, Puja delves into emotional inheritance and cross-cultural, intergenerational narrative. She is interested in why individual experiences of small everyday moments can be so different, yet unifying, and how the constructed environment can shape our inner and outer worlds. She is currently exploring British and Indian folktales and myths in her short screenplays. During her residency at Arteles, she is looking forward to being in nature and taking inspiration it. She hopes to reconnect to its spiritual aspects to see how this flows into her writing. Yi-Shuan Wu Taipei, Taiwan Painting www Hi,I am Yi-Shuan Wu, a painter from Taipei, Taiwan. In 2017, I enrolled at the the master’s program in Japanese Painting at Tama Art University in Tokyo, Japan. I use mineral pigments, ink, and gold or silver leaves to capture the shifting light and shadows, to portray emotions and warmth through depictions of animals, plants, and landscapes. I am drawn to the beauty of life’s simple but precious moments, the feelings of joy, happiness, inner peace, and hope. I enjoy observing people, how they develop relationships, how they show their emotions. I love observing nature, the changing of seasons, the different expressions of light. Matt Sears New York, USA Photography, Interdisciplinary Sculpture www Matt Sears is an interdisciplinary artist, fabricator, and craftsman based in Brooklyn, NY. Encompassing photography and sculpture his work explores collective time, the limits of memory, and impermanence. Utilizing analog and custom experimental photographic techniques, images range from months long exposures tracking the arc of the sun over the course of a year to returning to the same subject at different periods, capturing temporal durations inaccessible to direct experience. He approaches photography with an emphasis not toward a singular image or document but as a collection of gestures, which in their relation to one another create a displacement of the commonplace, to wrest the familiar in order to see things anew in the service of larger narratives.

Eliza McKenna Woodstock, USA Photography, Sculpture, Film & Video www "Eliza is a mystic and artist using photography to expand human perception." Eliza McKenna (b. 1997, Woodstock, NY) is an artist and mystic based in New York's Hudson Valley. Her work moves between photography, writing, and experimental materials to explore grief, memory, and consciousness within and beyond the body. She is interested in the image’s potential to uncover our thoughts, feelings, and unconscious beliefs. Eliza works within an idealist paradigm in which consciousness exists as the underlying reality of all physical form. Her practice is rooted in a desire to build visual systems for organizing her connection to this fundamental Source energy and to bring to light the ways art can expand human perception. Eliza holds a BA in Film Studies from Wesleyan University and an MFA in Photography from Pratt Institute. Erin Nichols Meanjin (Brisbane), Australia Pedagogy, Mixed-Media, Writing www Dr. Erin Nichols is a postqualitative researcher and philosopher of movement whose work explores the intersections of embodiment, feminist theory, and the cultural mediation of sportswomen. Working with affect theory and feminist new materialist approaches, she is interested in how contact and fight sports can create a “shock to thought,” care-fully mobilising kinetic excess as a force for (un)learning and re-imagining vulnerability, and becoming-otherwise. Her practice attends to the aesthetics of sensation, how bodies feel, move, and make meaning through intensity, rhythm, and relationality. Erin’s dedication to the creative-critical potential of an interdisciplinary approach seeks to challenge existing paradigms and coaching pedagogies, and contribute to more nuanced understandings of gender, embodiment, and sport. Erin lives on the unceded lands of the land of the Yugarabul, Yuggera, Jagera and Turrabal Peoples. Dirk Bahmann South Africa Sculpture, installation, architecture Dirk is a Johannesburg based South African visual artist, architect, and lecturer, and a doctoral candidate at the University of the Witwatersrand. Working across sculpture and spatial installation, his research investigates how atmospheres; the felt tonalities of space, shape perception, attachment, and meaning. He is particularly concerned with numinous affect, moments when places and spaces become charged with a thick sense of presence. His work aims to make intangible spatial qualities tangible and discussable, positioning atmosphere as a site of artistic, architectural, and pedagogical practice. His practice takes form through staged sculptural assemblages, spatial maquettes, and immersive installations that use material, form, and light to render atmosphere perceptible. Informed by posthumanist philosophy, his practice is grounded in iterative, hands on making as a form of inquiry and a dialogical way of working alongside materials, sites, and places. His methodology emphasizes slowness, deep listening, and sustained relation building, guided by an ethic of care toward the more than human ecologies with which he collaborates. See the list of all the Arteles residents here