The Netherlands based artist Katie Ceekay was artist in residence with Tampere Art Museum in Tampere, Finland for the AIR on the Edge residency from November - December 2023.
AIR on the Edge is a one-month international artist residency exchange between Denmark, Finland, Ireland, The Netherlands and Serbia. It focuses on artists professional development, creating opportunities for artists to engage with rural communities and is rooted in rural places and cities on the edges of Europe.
During her residency, Katie shared about her experience:
My time in Tampere has offered fertile ground to focus on, and attempt to engage in, a practice of being reciprocal: something that forms a part of my residency research theme on economies from the perspective of ExChange and Reciprocity. Capitalist mechanisms of spending time and engaging in resource flows hack our wider social understandings of what it means to co-exist, to thrive for self, and yet also to participate in the name of collectivity (for which we need access conditions).
In winter-time Finland, you need to dedicate considerable minutes of the day to packaging yourself together for braving the outdoor temperatures, and subsequently unpeeling and un-layering upon arrival to a context. There’s time for arriving, there’s physical space for placing, there’s acceptance for unwrapping mindfully - I think this is a beautiful and banal clue towards our natural states, where we are reminded that the time organisation dictating the labour market and neoliberalism is not above nature.
Observations and research have been popping between both head and hands learning, where learning by doing plays an important role: for me that’s the artistic aspect of practice. Over the past weeks, it's been a huge privilege to visit and engage with two specific local communities in a way where sharing vulnerability feels like a good flow of resources. As a social practice artist, it's important for me to think about how I can form connections in a respectful manner, with the contingency that I will leave the environment after a couple of weeks.
I feel so full of learning for my practice through this experience so far, and hope that I can leave behind lightly-useful traces. I am especially thankful for the open-minded attitude of my Tampere Art Museum care-takers, who have been exceptionally open to a practice that asks of them quite a lot. They have formed the third community and set of relations that I’ve been engaging with and am invested in. Alongside, I feel so lucky that the artist who will be on residency shortly after me works from a similar set of values and therefore is willing to gently connect our projects in the name of relational-sustainability.
Follow Katie and see more about her experience and her work here:
Instagram: @katie_ceekay
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