The Peanut Factory Artist Residency Program - September 2020
Julia Townsed
The Peanut Factory Artist Residency Program, located on Badham Road in Edenton (NC,USA), is pleased to announce three artists in residence for the month of September. Like the rest of the world, plans had to be adjusted: this year the residencies are virtual. The artists are posting their work, as well as interacting with each other and the public online. The Peanut Factory Facebook page or thepeanutfactory.org will display activities and include links to other sites, including a zoom event on September 24, at 6pm. Artists Ripley Whiteside and Tiffany Danielle Elliott, who originally intended to come to Edenton in person, have delayed their arrival until safer times, while this virtual opportunity has opened the door for Marcelo Guimarães Lima, an artist in São Paulo, Brazil.
The three artists approach their work very differently. Tiffany Danielle Elliott is based in Seattle, Washington, and has roots in Perquimons County. She works in video, photography, sound, soft sculpture and performance, and is interested in human connections and disconnections. “I think a lot about love. Why we do, and why we don’t.” She creates environments “hospitable to engaging uncomfortable contradictions,” in which she explores human relationships with one another, and the relationship of body to object and body as object. Among these many layers is also a fascination with our intense desire to document ourselves. Her main focus for this residency is to research and gather interviews from members of Edenton, Elizabeth City and Perquimans County around textile, family narrative and tradition. She plans to incorporate these interviews in a text piece and sound installation. If all goes well, she will do another residency in person at The Peanut Factory in 2021 to complete and create an installation available to the public. Simultaneously, she has just launched a performative piece at The Sculpture Center in Cleveland called THE digital COMPANION in which people can sign up for digital companionship from anywhere in the world, and she hopes have participants from Edenton. The Peanut Factory is developing a second documentation piece on sight that will be shared online. Further information can be found at http://thedigitalcompanion.org
Marcelo Guimarães Lima was born in Rio de Janeiro, grew up in São Paulo, and is a combination of artist, writer, and philosopher. He has taught or led community art projects in the Amazonian jungle, Spain, the US, and the United Arab Emirates, and now directs the art division at CEPAOS Research Center in São Paulo. “Art is a tool for survival,” he explains, “…a way to order and communicate our individual and collective experiences.” During his residency, he plans to make drawings, paintings, and prints, usually combined digitally, that take into account both the artist´s distance and the proximity (via the web) from The Peanut Factory, now an art factory. “The structure houses a different place of production from its original function,” he explains, “but it is still a place where materials are transformed according to plan, projections, ideas, intended uses and destinations.” In the shared global context of the corona virus pandemic, he will explore questions that come with it, about our place within nature. “The images I have seen of the region are indeed very attractive for the combination of green land, water and open skies. I imagine the place as a kind of frontier, the place of a dialogue and of exchanges of primary elements such as earth and water, a territory made of fields, rivers and swamps, where land and sea come together and reflect each other in different and dynamic ways.”
In contrast, Ripley Whiteside has an intimate and strong connection to Edenton and the region, as he grew up tramping around surrounding fields and swamps on family visits. His mother lives in Edenton. Born in Siler City, NC, he spent his early years in Chapel Hill and Durham. He lived in Montreal for a while, then New York City for a few years, and is now based in Nashville, TN. He makes drawings and paintings, usually on paper, using the landscape as a starting point to explore the difference between ecology and nature. He is interested in “what should and should not be considered natural, and how absurd this line of questioning can become.” During his residency, he intends to continue some explorations into printmaking without a press, and further some experiments with texture and watercolor. “I’ve been enjoying playing with colored pencils recently, and I might undertake a long and detailed drawing with these. The work I’ve been making this year has to do with weather, especially fog.” He currently has a solo exhibition at the Pierre-François Ouellette Gallery in Montreal.
Many examples of all three artists’ works are available to see online, with The Peanut Factory Facebook page as a starting point for links. The arts center became a 501©3 nonprofit organization in 2019, and also houses a newly established frame shop called Third and Badham.
For further information, please email juliatownsend@yahoo.com or call (252) 484-0225.
source: The Chowan Herald September, 17, 2020
Julia Townsend, founder and director of The Peanut Center Artist Residency Program, is a multilingual and multicultural visual artist and teacher.
link: Julia Townsend Artworks
Thursday, Sept 24th, 6-7 pm - Meet the Artists - Zoom LIVE onlineHosted by Heather Muise, Artist/Printmaker, Professor at East Carolina University
The Peanut Factory Facebook page
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