Anna Gardiner, who is studying on the MA Contemporary Art and Archaeology, has recently returned from a residency in Aberdeen and has written about the experience:
I was told by many people that January was the worst month to visit Aberdeen, that it would be miserably cold, wet and grey, and they were not wrong. However, nothing could put a dampener on my month as artist-in-residence at my Outer Spaces studio in Aberdeen’s Shiprow.
I was there as the recipient of the Outer Spaces Scotland Award, which I received for my installation at the RSA New Contemporaries 2025 Exhibition, and as part of RSA200: Celebrating Together, a variety of events and activities across Scotland to celebrate the bicentenary of the Royal Scottish Academy. I was also fortunate to receive funding from Creative Scotland and The Hope Scott Trust, which allowed me to devote myself entirely to my art practice while I was in Aberdeen.
My aim during the residency was to engage in research and development toward a compact and lightweight but expansive ‘underwater sacred grove’ exhibition that I hope to tour around Scottish island communities using public transport. I spent my first week on practicalities, exploring ways of fixing and hanging my dog-hair fishing nets and approaches to wall-treatment that followed my guiding principles: have a light-touch and embrace impermanence.
Then followed a glorious week back in Orkney for the Contemporary Art & Archaeology MA Winter School – bombing around in a minibus looking at everything from Neolithic tombs to modern wind turbines under the guidance of Dan Lee, learning about stone tools with Mark Edmonds and antler with Ben Elliott, and enjoying the creative energy and company of my fellow students.
I returned to Aberdeen tired but inspired and ready to dive into learning and making art.
With its rich maritime history, Aberdeen was the ideal place for this nerdish artist to get her nose deep into research. The Maritime Museum felt like spending time with my seafaring family and the Aberdeen City Archives were a slice of heaven for me – a full day spent up a tower copying maps and charts dating back to the 1700s and gathering the found poetry of the Register of Sea Fishing Boats 1887-1891.
Back in my studio I played with creating an indoor underwater world using my fishing nets, muslin screen beings, and projection of underwater footage. This world became a stage and a collaborator for my performance art. In my dog-hair fishing net costume I found the fragile yet powerful being who inhabited this world and collected raw footage and photographs for future video and embroidery works, in collaboration with my photographer and UHI archaeology PhD student Logan O’Brien.
In addition to learning and making, I also engaged in one of my other passions, teaching, holding free public workshops on making drop-spindles and spinning yarn. The best part, as ever, was making connections with other creative humans. I met many of the more permanent residents of the Outer Spaces studios, and I am looking forward to future collaborations.
Having returned to Orkney, I can now take the time to apply what I discovered and learned, taking the ideas and other raw materials I gathered and begin to weave them all together into a coherent whole. Just one month as artist-in-residence in Aberdeen will feed my creative practice for years to come.
