Meet the artists: Common Interest Residency, LCT 2022

UK New Artists is delighted to introduce you to the selected artists for the ‘Common Interest’ residency as part of our City Takeover in Leicester. The artists represent a range of art forms, from performance to poetry to dance.

The residency will be rooted in collaboration, and how to find common interest in working practices. Specifically, the group will work with the concept of the body - the body of work; the artist’s body (as work); the disenfranchised or marginalised body. The group will participate in workshops, creative experiments, walks and discussions.

Courtney Conrad

Courtney Conrad is a Jamaican poet. She is a Roundhouse Poetry Slam runner-up and a BBC Fringe Slam finalist. She was a Roundhouse Poetry Collective and Poet in the City Producer alumni. She has competed internationally in Philadelphia at CUPSI. She was a featured poet at Glastonbury Festival and UKYA City Takeover Festival. She was a participating poet in the BBC Words First Scheme. She was published in the ‘Field Notes on Survival’ Anthology published by Bad Betty Press. She was longlisted for the Women Poets' Prize. Her poetry explores the intersectionality between Black, Caribbean, Queer, Christian and Womxn identities.

Luke Beech

‘How to Perform like an Artist’, photo by Mollie Balshaw

Luke Beech is an Artist and Educator. His recent works include a number of Durational Performances, undertaken to help him make sense of his own Mental Health. He empowers people with the tools for critical thinking – using the familiar fabric of everyday life in new and intuitive ways, as well as exploring the contexts that these materials and processes sit in. Career highlights include a public sculpture for Associated British Ports and a Public Engagement project for the 2017 Turner Prize. He is a Founder and Director of The Feral Art School cooperative in Hull.

Niamh Seana Meehan

Niamh Seana Meehan is a visual artist based in Northern Ireland. Working in-between visual art, performance and written matter based on the slippages involved within the translation of thought to text. Her practice investigates the unknowability of language, its messiness and how it has the potential to become visual, performative and moveable. To create sub-language, metanarrative or language that spills onto the other page. Themes include emptiness, ambiguity and doubt.

Sunny Vowles

Formable, Erased, Alive, Again. Photo by Jules Lister

Which was perhaps the reward of having cared. Photo by Sam Hutchinson

Sunny Vowles is an interdisciplinary visual artist based in Leeds. Working primarily with sculpture, her practice also comprises text, sound, movement, installation and collaboration.

Poetry is an important undertone fuelling meaning in her work, and she has a growing interest in the potential of analogue mechanisms as a framework for performance, feeling, memory and gesture.

Zara Sands

Photo by Andrew Hastings, with thanks to Dora Frankel

Since graduating from Trinity Laban in 2019, Zara has been researching and touring contemporary dance work on a freelance basis for various companies and choreographers such as Dora Frankel, Aline Derderian (Consensus Cie.) and Matthew Rawcliffe. She has also worked in film, having choreographed and directed a Random Act for Channel 4’s Random Acts. Zara feels she is yet to develop a singular identity as an artist and creative. She is eager to explore the role of the performer as choreographer and how this offers insight into the identity and idiosyncrasies of an artist in front of an audience.

Madara VimbaJanuary 22, 2021artists, magazine, M3