Artists-in-Residence (2026 - 2027)
Jamie Wardrop
Jamie Wardrop is a Glasgow-based artist, visual designer and creative technologist working across performance, theatre, installation and immersive moving image. His practice combines projection, animation, live visuals and digital tools to create atmospheric, communal experiences that explore ecology, place and environmental change. For his EMBracing the Ocean project, he will create an immersive, multi-projection cinema experience staged inside a structure that echoes the form of a salmon farm cage, inviting audiences to see the world from the salmon’s perspective. Using 2D and 3D animation, virtual production, projection and spatial audio, the work will reveal the complex realities behind one of Scotland and the UK’s most significant global food exports. The project will explore the gap between public perception, consumer image and the realities of farmed salmon, while acknowledging the difficult balance faced by scientists and the aquaculture industry: feeding a growing population while protecting animal welfare and reducing pressure on local ecosystems. Jamie will collaborate with Professor Martin Llewellyn at the University of Glasgow, whose innovative research uses environmental DNA as an early warning signal for the detection of parasites and ecological changes in the water column around farms.
Find out more about the project here.
Elisabeth Kihlstrom
Elisabeth Kihlström is a Vienna-based artist working across weaving, film, performance, and installation. She holds a master's from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2015) and her practice examines bodies, spaces, and systems through material and temporal processes, rooted in queer experience. For millennia, the fan mussel, Pinna nobilis, was prized for its golden sea silk, a coveted material of antiquity. Today, it exists primarily as data, DNA samples and forensic protocols reflecting ecological collapse and cultural instrumentalization. Her EMBracing the Ocean project "L'oro del Mare" begins at this historical inversion, where a species once extracted for human desire now embody environmental stress and ideological projection. Classified as a strictly protected species under European law since the 1990s, Pinna nobilis is today facing mass mortality. L'oro del Mare combines fieldwork, scientific collaboration, artisanal knowledge, and archival research to explore Pinna nobilis as both a biological organism and a historical site. The project is developed in collaboration with the University of Sassari and the University of Genoa. In 2027, she will present the work as part of a solo exhibition at OK Museum in Linz.
Find out more about the project here.