With the news that AirSpace Gallery founder and beating heart, Andrew Branscombe was to leavre the organisation after 10 years to take up the major role of co-ordinating the huge technical requirements at nearby Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, we set about trying to fill the huge gap that Andy left.
In truth, it would take two people to fulfil all the roles Andy undertook, but we have made a start, and we didn't have to look too far!
Emilie Atkinson finished her Graduate Residency with us in January 2016. The commitment she showed both to the city, in relocating from London, and to the residency, and the critical quality of and endeavour in her practice, made it a straightforward choice. We're delighted to welcome Emilie on board, and look forward to working together in this next exciting and challenging phase both for AirSpace and for the contemporary arts in Stoke-on-Trent.
It became apparent to me straight away, when
I arrived to start the AirSpace graduate residency in 2015, that Stoke was an
exciting place to be as an artist. The projects I saw whilst lingering in the
cultural quarter for my interview, tapped into a sensibility that was
unfamiliar to me fresh out of art school in London – the Peregrine Watch
situated on Piccadilly and the CITY-GROW Planters sat outside of AirSpace showed an incredibly exciting
generosity and collaborative spirit so different from the egoistic nature of
much of the work I’d experienced at art school. Whilst as the same time, the
projects mirrored my own interest in meditating on the everyday and the current
socio-political landscape.
Throughout my
residency I came across more and more endeavors of this nature within the city
(both through spending time at AirSpace, as well as volunteering with the
British Ceramics Biannual and Appetite) and I grew more and more
certain that having left London, Stoke was the city I wanted to push my
practice further in, beyond the graduate residency. Hence, I am inexplicably
excited that I have been asked to join the gallery as a director and contribute
to its current research.
Following my graduate residency I spent 3 months as
artist in residence in Clermont-Ferrand, France, which gave me time to reflect
on new directions emerging in my work, as well as many of the French attitudes
to the quotidian. I believe this will come to influence new research into local
food and market culture that I shall take up whilst working with AirSpace. I
also hope to bring my ongoing interest in artist moving image and cinema to the
gallery, as I feel that a platform to show such work, as a curated series of
events in a cinema setting, would benefit both artists working in film &
video as well as local audiences.
- Emilie Atkinson
