Feeney Fellows 2023
Trustees are delighted to announce that the 2023 Feeney Fellowships have been awarded to
Ian Andrews and Carolyn Morton
Ian Andrews
Ian is committed to trans-disciplinary approaches believing it is crucial to develop a “creative curiosity” in audiences and participants that transcends barriers between diverse specialisms. He is particularly interested in approaches that link art and science, searching for correspondences between the methodologies adopted by both and what it means to be creative in the two disciplines.
During a residency at the University of Birmingham working with award-winning particle physicist Prof Kostas Nikolopoulos in 2018 Ian made transformational changes to his practice creating the project The Sketchbook and the Collider which seeks to establish equivalents between the interaction of fundamental particles and the basic visual elements of the language of drawing. He has since delivered 14 exhibitions/events and 35 workshops, including a solo exhibition at the Forum Exposition Bonlieu, Annecy, France in October 2022, “Reality is not what it seems,” following which Ian was invited to talk at the International Particle Physics Outreach Group 25th annual conference at CERN in Geneva.
He was honoured in July this year by the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation in the USA and is in receipt of a grant in support of Lee Krasner’s mission to advance the work of exceptional visual artists experiencing financial difficulty. He recently returned to the University of Birmingham as artist in residence with the Centre for Systems Modelling and Quantitative Biomedicine working with a research team led by Harvard physicist professor Clare Anderson investigating the disruption of circadian rhythms in the brain.
For his Feeney Fellowship Ian will attempt to combine drawing, three-dimensional form and the moving image components of his work in an integrated approach. He will work with a Birmingham-based fabricator to create three-dimensional structures on which the drawings will be created and with a video production expert to upgrade his skills in filming, editing and projection.
Photo credit: Max Andrews
Carolyn Morton
Carolyn is an experienced participatory artist working with marginalised or vulnerable people. Her lived experience of grief informed a hospice residency researching how making with our hands can help make sense of lived experience. Her work with loss and restoration now extends to include the natural world as the impacts and consequences of the climate crisis intensify.
For her Feeney Fellowship, Carolyn will develop new forms of participation and collaboration focused on working with the materials she makes from wild plants. Her semi-wild allotment is both a materials source and a research site for botanical inks and pigments. She has been developing a biomaterial for 3D printing using Field Horsetail.
The Feeney Fellowship will support Carolyn in developing 3D modeling software skills, collaborating with a range of artists and makers to expand how she works with the materials she makes and exploring restorative making to include the more-than-human.
