Look Again’s annual Seed Fund Awards take a new form this year, adapting in response to Covid-19 with a new series of Digital Residencies set to take place from July to September this year. Supported artists taking part in the new series are: Maja Zećo and Luca Nasciuti presenting Streaming to the Sea in July, Laura McGlinchey, Paper Cave Anti-Rave in August and Alice Martin presenting {Re} Seeing in September.
A central part of Look Again Visual Art and Design Festival over the past five years, this year’s Seed Fund has been adapted to suit our new context, while maintaining crucial support for emerging visual artists. Each artist has been invited to undertake a Digital Residency, working with Look Again in the coming months to present work via the Look Again Instagram channel as a digital project space, until the physical exhibition space in Aberdeen reopens to the public.
The ambitious new works are a creative response to the current context, utilising this unprecedented global moment to invite dialogue with wider audiences, create new international connections, stream live performance and present physical work in new ways.
Hilary Nicoll, Look Again Co-Director said:
For us it was very important to continue our commitment to these artists through this difficult period, working to support them to find the best way to share their work with the public within the context of Covid-19.
Maja Zećo and Luca Nasciuti: Streaming to the Sea
Streaming to the Sea is an online residency that will inspire the public to explore their local environments through storytelling, walking and listening. The artists aim to open up new ways of working with the audience, as contributors to their project, through creative engagement with social media.
The conversation with the online community will explore how we relate to rivers and seas in everyday life. Maja and Luca will begin their exploration from their locations, respectively Aberdeen and London, and they will develop their work on memories and stories from many other rivers and coasts, in the month ahead.
Laura McGlinchey: Paper Cave Anti-Rave
Based in Glasgow for the lockdown, McGlinchey has been able to continue to work in her studio where she has been building extraordinary sculptural installations using recycled bill board posters, event flyers and advertising materials, to create densely worked, cave-like environments.
These materials have a particular poignancy now, as ephemeral records of our social lives before Covid, that recall the connectedness and collaboration of the urban creative scenes that already seem part of another world. For Paper Cave Anti Rave she will be building a new installation and stream fly on the wall documentation of the time spent in the studio and collaborative events with musicians and poets over the course of the month.
Alice Martin: {Re} Seeing
Alice Martin is fascinated by museums and historical collecting, and the ways in which the viewer experiences culture and heritage. By recreating objects and artefacts using digital and 3D technologies, she re-presents collections, and in doing so encourages us to reconsider their value and interpretation. Focusing on archaeological material Martin has curated a diverse collection of open content pieces ranging from painted wall fragments, oil lamps, beads, and flooring. Rather than emphasising the eras and locations behind each item she brings new energy to the past by looking at functionality, preservation of colour and the everyday.
For {Re} Seeing the hope is to re-open the Look Again project space in September, inviting audiences to experience Martin’s work both in physical and digital space. Connecting the two will invite dialogue and perspectives to be formed.