SHOWCASING OUR ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE
AMANDA CORNISH
2025 Artist in residence - in collaboration with the Royal Society of Sculptors
Amanda Cornish is a London-based multi-disciplinary artist who graduated with an MA Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, where she also completed the Graduate Diploma Fine Art Programme. Prior, she studied Fine Art at Chelsea School of Art.
Working across sculpture, installation, drawing, sound, and text, Cornish sees her works as a collaboration with found objects. Her process begins with the spontaneous encounter, where found items from industrial, domestic, or natural environments act not as passive elements but as agents to provoke a creative dialogue. Her work operates at the intersection of spatial theory and material culture, where she explores how we experience and interact with space, investigating ways our physical environments and surrounding materials shape us. Using materials often in a state of decay or flux - old clothing, soap, rust and medical latex - her work is centred around the acceptance of impermanence, imperfection and the transient, to search for the essence of being.
“I’m thrilled to have been awarded the Eilean Shona Residency - a rare an unique opportunity to focus on artistic exploration, embrace the stillness for introspection, and deepen my understanding of both. I’m curious to see how solitude shapes the mind and excited to discover where the unbound exploration will lead my work.”
Amanda Cornish has exhibited in the UK and internationally, with solo exhibitions at Mumford Fine Art (London) and The China Club (Hong Kong). She has been the recipient of several awards, including the Gilbert Bayes Award from The Royal Society of Sculptors, the DRAW19 Monochrome Prize, the NOA Heart of England Award, and the RSMA Charles Pears Award.
Artists in Residence from previous years
ROBIN TARBET
2024 Artist in residence - in collaboration with the Royal Society of Sculptors
Robin Tarbet is an artist based in London. He studied at the Royal College of Art and Norwich School of Art & Design. Tarbet is a collector of everyday stuff, and he uses ad-hoc casting and print processes to make work that features transformations of recognisable things in unfamiliar situations. His practice often incorporates a performative ‘working in the field’ approach and recent projects have included plaster casting dead Jellyfish washed up on a beach to the making of moulds inside a nuclear power station. Tarbet regularly shows both in the UK and Internationally, and his work has featured in many exhibitions ranging from prestigious Institutions to pop up artist run spaces, as well as site specific projects with The London Underground and Cultural Olympiad. In 2015 he was Artist in Residence at ESXLA in Los Angeles where he explored the city by foot to source the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and locations used in the film Blade Runner. Further a field he spent time in Arizona visiting desert bone yards containing thousands of stored aeroplanes, and specifically the failed 80s science experiment Biosphere 2, now managed by the University of Arizona. Between 2014-18 Tarbet participated in the artist initiated research project ‘Power In The Land’ a multi venue touring show across Wales where along with 9 other artists he presented his response to the decommissioning of Wylfa Nuclear Power Station - the Last Nuclear power station in Wales. In 2009 he was selected to produce a large-scale live video installation for East International, which then toured as a solo exhibition to Trafo Gallery Budapest. To accompany his studio practice Tarbet has also taught Fine Art as a Senior Lecturer within many Art Schools and Universities. He is a mentor for the charity Arts Emergency, a former Trustee Director of Creekside Artists, founder of Swap Editions, and in 2022 established object|multiple an artist-led curatorial platform and store with Duncan Wooldridge.
Marie-Thérèse Ross
2023 Artist in residence - in collaboration with the Royal Society of Sculptors
The artist Marie-Thérèse Ross, based in London, holds a First Class BA Hons in painting from Loughborough College of Art & Design (1985) and an MFA in sculpture from the University of Pennsylvania USA (1991). She won the Art Gemini Prize in 2021. Her most recent solo show Hotel Pavot at the Stone Space featured a specially commissioned music composition to create an immersive installation. Recent group shows have been at The Royal Cambrian Academy of Art in Wales, OVADA Gallery in Oxford, Arthouse1 and APT Gallery in London. Marie-Thérèse has worked for many years as a museum educator both in New York and in London including at the National Gallery and the Wallace Collection. Working in museums such as these has left a mark on her work, and she often uses compositions and themes found in the works of the great masters of European painting.
The residency on Eilean Shona represented a new challenge to the artist, where she sought to address her new environment with its temperate rain forest, beaches and pine forests. She worked outdoors in the landscape making site specific sculptures and wood block prints. She also made small wall-based sculptures using found materials including bark, lichens and seaweed, as well as producing over 100 drawings and watercolours. The experience has left a lasting impact on her practice.
MHAIRI VARI
2022 Artist in residence - in collaboration with the Royal Society of Sculptors
Mhairi Vari is a sculptor working in London. On receiving her Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art (Sculpture) at Royal Academy Schools in 2004, she was awarded the Royal British Sculpture Society Award, with a solo exhibition at RBS Gallery, London in 2005. In 2010-2011 Vari was awarded the Wheatley Fine Art Bequest Fellowship at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design. She has exhibited regularly in Galleries, in Cellars, in Barns, and Universities, in Art Fairs and fund-raising auctions to universal acclaim.
Her work often consists of material, philosophical and conceptual engagement with environmental concerns - fusing built with grown, synthetic with natural, virtual with physical – she seeks a sensitive sculptural and sonic language that incorporates a relative transience and fragility. Exploring concepts rooted in the natural sciences she toys with structuring and ordering of materials gathered over time, accumulated and shape-shifted into new form. She employs emergent processes of making rather than those of design, always seeking the unexpected. Drawing materially, intellectually and emotionally, upon human relationships with ‘natural’ worlds and from the liminality of coastal sublime she engages in sculptural exploration of organic, arboreal and fungal form. Her residency on Eilean Shona was an opportunity to develop these relationships and thoughts while immersed in remote island habitat.
CALUM MCCLURE
2021 Artist in Residence
Calum McClure was born in 1987 and graduated in Drawing and Painting from Edinburgh College of Art in 2010. McClure’s drawings, prints and paintings depict country estates, cemeteries, national parks and botanical gardens – places created for man’s solace and pleasure. He thinks about these places as a modern Arcadia; into which people can escape for a few hours every week. Through a varied use of paint McClure explores the complexity of images taken from nature that at first look simple. The motif of reflection has become important in his work, challenging the viewer to think about what has been painted and the tactile nature of the painting process. Recent work has taken inspiration from various source images, including film stills, photographs from train windows and other photographs taken whilst walking. He is currently working on ideas and themes including: nocturne, botanic gardens, the idea of an 'in-between image', and more generally light and its reflective qualities.
He was the winner of the 2011 Jolomo Painting Award, has had two successful exhibitions with The Scottish Gallery and was an invited artist at the Annual Exhibition of the Royal Academy in London in 2012. Recently he has been included in an exhibition of prints at the Royal Academy, London; had work in the major Scottish art societies' annual exhibitions; had work exhibited at the RA Summer Exhibition 2016 and won a prize at the inaugural W Gordon Smith Award for painting. He was shortlisted (5 artists) for the 2020 Jerwood Printmaking today prize.
In his second solo exhibition at Candida Stevens Gallery Calum McClure reflects upon one of his longstanding preoccupations, trees. Most of the exhibition was made after the Spring of 2021 when the artist travelled to Eilean Shona. There he gathered images of its pinetum, which was planted in the 19th century by one of the island’s past owners Captain Swinburne. The resulting paintings show that some of the trees brought from abroad have fared better than others, some appear to have struggled with the climate, look untended or out-competed by the faster growing spruces, whilst others have flourished and can be seen towering from the mainland. The passing of time is acknowledged in the title of one of the exhibition’s main works Forgotten Trophies,(2021). This painting depicts some of the rarest specimens on the island, planted in a sheltered hollow behind the main house.
He has also made paintings of the native species such as the silver birches, whose gnarled forms hug the coastline. This tangle of the native and imported species can be seen in Trees and Windows On A Beach, A Dream, (2021) in which the trees appear to metamorphose and blend, creating a dance of shapes on the sand. There is also a hint at a human presence in the clean angle of a window on the right of the painting.
MARY RAMSDEN
2020 Artist in Residence
Born 1984, North Yorkshire, UK. Lives and works in London and North Yorkshire.
Mary Ramsden’s paintings track a ceaseless, ever-supple reckoning with her medium: its materiality and histories, its complex deals with figuration and abstraction, the points where it yields, the points where it resists. Drawing on ways of seeing that are both long-established and acutely contemporary (not least those inaugurated by new technology), there is an archaeological quality to the way she lays down, and excavates, strata of marks and pigments, buried deposits of time and space. With their audacious play of textures, surface and scale, these are paintings that insist on their own physicality, the impossibility of their reduction to mere image. Rather, like us, they belong to the world of objects, a realm of densities and depths.
Ramsden has spoken of painting as ‘thinking with the hand’, and her works bear the traces of a restless, embodied cognition. Uncertainty abides, along with persistent reaching for (hard-won) self-actualisation. The intellectual and the sensory are not so much translated as transfused into form and colour. A work’s limit conditions are defined, then tested, and sometimes extravagantly breached. Where depiction is in evidence in these paintings, it has a fugitive quality, as if Ramsden’s marks were not quite willing to be wholly subsumed into the pictorial, preferring to retain a measure of autonomy as an arrangement of pigment on a support. This is a glitch that is also a feature: a way of capturing and sequencing those concrete abstractions, time and space.