Art Gene invites an artist to apply to take up a two-week residency at our Isle of Walney outdoor project space, Allotment Soup, in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria. Working with our refugee community, we would like you to explore traditional recipes from their home counties around the world, and adapt them with locally sourced ingredients.

REAL Barrow Food, futures & biodiversity

Artist in Residence Open Call.

This residency will focus on an exciting collaboration with our asylum seeking and refugee communities to explore food cultures and to produce food to share.

The artist will lead a series of five engagement sessions designed to gather stories, cooking techniques, and the cultural significance of food, with support from Art Gene’s creative gardener, Bethan Pettitt, and local cook, Russ Dean.

Public engagement is a significant element of the residency. Art Gene holds well developed relationships with community groups and volunteers, including with the recently arrived asylum-seeking communities in the town.

The artist will develop a format for the workshops, encouraging participants to share their culinary heritage through creative and cooking sessions and creative activities.

The results of these sessions will contribute to a community recipe book, which will be designed in-house at Art Gene and will document the stories of our volunteers (as far as they are comfortable to do so), their chosen dishes and potentially the artists’ work.

Central to the residency and the project is a focus on food, culture, sustainability and empowering refugee communities to co-lead and shape a project.

The project will culminate in Spring 2025 with a seed planting session, followed by a celebratory feast, where the community will present dishes prepared with ingredients grown at Allotment Soup and during the residency.

The artist will share their artwork and experience, and local longer-term residents who also volunteer at Allotment Soup will add to the conversation.

The printed recipe book will be distributed to all participants free of charge and may be offered for sale to the public.

Art Gene encourages applications from artists interested in socially engaged practice, community building, and sustainability, who are keen to explore the relationships between food, culture, and nature.

We especially encourage artists of colour or those with lived experiences of migration – currently underrepresented in our work – to apply.

Our procurement policy favours local procurement, and we welcome applications from artists based nearby in Cumbria, Lancashire or Yorkshire.

The two-week residency is part of Art Gene’s ongoing programme exploring the social, natural, and built environment with communities to deliver change.

Our work examines the collisions of art, industry and nature in the landscape of Barrow.

At Allotment Soup, we explicitly explore the pressing issues impacting on local people and biodiversity of this place.

This work is part of our commitment to environmentally sound, low-carbon practices and to the Zero Carbon Cumbria Partnership, of which we are a founding partner.

Owen Griffiths, Artist in Residence 2021, says of Allotment Soup:

“To begin as a community, to work together with friends, neighbours and allies, we have to work locally. We must dig where we stand. The Allotment Soup site … is an example of local and radical work – hosting global dialogues whilst being firmly rooted in the specificities of a landscape that bears the scars of the industrial revolution.

It’s a complicated landscape of contradictions, warmth, nature, biodiversity and resilience; it’s also located on an island that is shrinking.”

Location

Art Gene’s ‘Allotment Soup: Isle of Walney Community Growing Space’, Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, LA14 3XX, UK. See our Facebook page.

Residency period: two weeks/9 working days in the period 4 November to 14 December with a suggested five public engagement sessions, and with at least six days based in Barrow. You will be expected to present your results on one day in Spring 2025.

Budget

Total fee £2250 in residence, to include accommodation. Travel expenses of up to £200 will be reimbursed on production of receipts and you will have access to free use of our company e-bike when based in Barrow.

Fee based on 10 days @ £225 per day = £2250. Artists are encouraged to use repurposed materials where possible.

At Allotment Soup you will have use of the outdoor space, including a pond and large sheltered polytunnels with workshop facilities.

Art Gene’s studios, fabrication workshop and our extensive range of workshop tools and offices are also available for artists’ use free of charge on a 24-hour basis: The Nan Tait Centre, Bath Street, Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria LA14 5TY.

A list of local self-catering accommodations will be provided a short distance away from Allotment Soup.

Further information

Art Gene’s Allotment Soup; Isle of Walney Community Growing Space, occupies a field on Walney Island, Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria.

More than just an allotment, the design of the site, interventions and actions are about growing food, habitats, and new ideas.

The field is a site for play and social connection but also for environmental activism and strategic re-wilding of both local habitats and people. Investigate further: www.art-gene.co.uk/project/allotment-soup

The residency will be shared online, with a dedicated artist’s page on Art Gene’s website, and promoted through Art Gene’s newsletter and social media.

We always encourage applications from neurodivergent or disabled artists, artists from Black, Asian or minority ethnic communities or LGBTQ+ people.

Please be aware, however, that Allotment Soup is a field site, and not fully accessible.

There is a step up from the road and a shallow slope to the manual gate. Paths are flat but are unmade (grass and gravel) and can be boggy in wet weather. The site is off grid (with some renewable power available) and has a compost toilet.

This residency is made possible by the Westmorland and Furness Council Refugee Support Fund, Cumbria Action for Sustainability and Arts Council England.

How to apply

To apply, please send: