Open Residencies

Ruth Taylor & Auke de Vries

Angela Hijjas Open Residencies, Resident Artist , , ,
Ruth Taylor & Auke de Vries

Animated Trip

Ruth Taylor and Auke de Vries are professional animators from The Netherlands who both worked in the TV industry for a few years. After working commercially they wanted more time to spend on their personal artwork. So they decided to go on a trip around the world to explore new environments, learn from different cultures, get inspired and create artwork based on these experiences. Malaysia is their second stop of the 7 countries they’re going to visit. In 6 months they will travel from artist residency to artist residency. You can follow them on their journey on Facebook.

Ruth Taylor

Ruth Taylor is both animator and illustrator. She grew up in Rotterdam, where her interest in illustrating grew. After finishing high school she moved to Breda to study at St. Joost Art Academy. While she was studying, she started doing mainly illustration, but after a while she considered that the possibilities of moving images were also very interesting. Animals and nature are a recurring theme in her illustrations and animations. She loves creating detailed illustrations and the painstaking work of animation does not keep her from putting those details in for a few seconds of animation, frame by frame. You can check out her work on her website.

Auke de Vries
Auke de Vries is a filmmaker, animator and motion graphics designer. He graduated from the St. Joost Art Academy and uses a wide variety of animation techniques in his work such as stop motion, mixed media and computer animation. He strips down complex stories to tell their essence in a simple way and puts the real world in perspective by creating his own, usually with a bit of humor. You can check out his work on his website.

Rose Thomas

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Rose Thomas

Rose Thomas, founder and creative director of New Zealand label Nymphets uses costume, textile design and multi medium art in a fresh approach to fashion.

Installation and performance art are central to exhibiting Rose’s work. Under the Nymphets brand, Rose has created a fantasy world allowing her audience a kaleidoscope view into her personal aesthetic and perspective.

Nymphets is a unisex label and Rose wishes to further explore gender politics in fashion while at Rimbun Dahan. A deeper understanding of how clothing affects how a person is perceived and approached in society will allow an increased emphasis on gender fluidity in Rose’s future collections.

After travelling through South East Asia in February and March of this year in search of new and colourful inspiration, Rose will also focus on textile design and developing her fashion photography portfolio during her residency at Rimbun Dahan.

(written by Anna Hanlon)

Rhiannon Rebecca Salisbury

Angela Hijjas Open Residencies, Resident Artist , ,
Rhiannon Rebecca Salisbury

Rhiannon Rebecca Salisbury is an emerging artist from London. Since the inception of her career her work has been exhibited across Europe and the US (London, Rome, New York, Los Angeles). The Artist was awarded The Rome Art Program Scholarship, The Art Academy Mixed Media Prize, and won The “Picture the Heath” painting prize.

The artist’s work recalls Alan Moore’s assertions that; “The one place gods and demons inarguably exist is in the human mind where they are real in all their grandeur and monstrosity. Much of magic as I understand it in the Western Occult tradition is the search for the self with a capital S. This is being understood as being the great work the gold that alchemist sort.”

I have a formal approach to painting that is guided by aesthetic intuition. For me painting is an enabling medium that opens up a liminal space to access memories from the subconscious.

My influences range from the Surrealists concerns with the unconscious, through to contemporary practices concerned with memory and magic. My practise is one of recall and expulsion, it is a process of storytelling and self mythologising.

In order to produce an image the first thing I do is recall an experience. I focus on the emotions that my memory of the experience evokes and try to intensify them. Once I have brought the experiential feelings to the forefront of my mind, I begin the technique of visualisation. Many things rush through my minds eye, I allow these to settle and try to consolidate the whirling forms, colours and flash backs into a single image that will embody them.

Rhiannon will be in Rimbun Dahan from the start of April to the start of May 2015. Find more of her work on her website and blog. She is also on Twitter and Facebook.

 

Jennifer Tyers

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Jennifer Tyers

 

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Jennifer Tyers has been a resident artist at Rimbun Dahan for three months. She works with watercolour and paints landscapes. Sometimes she works in printmaking and book making. She has been based in Asia for several years, working on landscapes at the Singapore Botanic Gardens and was also an artist in resident at AIRY in Kofu, Japan, in 2014. She has an exhibition at Cast Gallery in Hobart, Tasmania in May.

At Rimbun Dahan Jennifer is painting the grounds with particular interest in the various plants and trees on Rimbun Dahan.

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Helen Dalton

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Helen Dalton

Helen Dalton painter

My work extends many of the ideas of portraiture and psychological exploration. The power of the portrait image always fascinates me. But rather than create anachronisms for their own sake, I choose to use such imagery and technique as a point of departure for exploring a world that is idiosyncratic, personal, and capable of transcending time and place. The surfaces of the paintings are varied, but they are always alive. The multiple layers of consciousness are explored as I create, construct, reveal and expose areas of the work. I see myself not just as a portrait painter but rather as a commentator of the histories and experiences of people I know and the community in which I live. I see myself as a contemporary history painter.

During recent years my work has focused not just on portraiture but also on nature as a means of documenting a region that I am visiting. In 2011 I was invited to be artist in residence on a field trip to Rwanda. I joined a team of scientists in the Volcanoes National Park a region that straddles the border between Rwanda and the Congo. These scientists examined the impact of environmental changes on gorillas in the region, and on how environments have changed in the recent past. Inspired by this residency my work looked at the experiences of the people I met in Rwanda and the human- environment interactions researched by the scientists. Many of the paintings are based loosely on real environmental scenarios. The day-to-day challenges faced by those living in poverty, the clearing of forests for subsistence farming and its impact on the mountain gorilla, the impact of the population on the land, and how implementing sustainable forms of development can have beneficial impact the local communities. In these human narratives I try to convey at least a small fragment of the complex story of the people I met in Rwanda. For me, these images I am creating function as reflecting pools of our times.

Helen Dalton is an Irish painter. Her portraits were described by Aidan Dunne in the Irish Times as “exceptionally sympathetic”. She has been awarded residencies in USA, Costa Rica Spain, Ireland and Rwanda. Her residency at Rimbun Dahan in July 2014 was funded by the Irish Arts Council.

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Naiara Mendioroz & Javier Murugarren

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Naiara Mendioroz & Javier Murugarren

In March 2014, Basque artists Naiara Mendioroz and Javier Murugarren spent a short residency at Rimbun Dahan. During their stay, they developed a duet work, also using the traditional wooden Basque musical instrument, the txalaparta, and the recently developed metal drum instruments, the hang.

They gave an open studio presentation of the work they created. They also experimented with using materials from the garden at Rimbun Dahan in the creation of costumes.

About Naiara Mendioroz

Graduated from the Official Ballet School of Pamplona (Spain) in 2000. In 2003, she graduated at the SNDO “School for New Dance Development” in Amsterdam. Following her graduation from SNDO she was awarded the DanceWeb scholarship for Contemporary Dance taking place at the Impulstanz in Vienna, Austria. She has danced for and toured internationally with various choreographers including Eleanor Bauer, Boris Charmatz, Nicole Beutler (piece based on Lucinda Child’s work), Frey Faust, Keren Levi, Peter Greenaway, Pere Faura, Paz Rojo, Mette Ingvartsen, Juan Dominguez, Beth Gill, Kate Mcintosh, Jefta Van Dinther and DD Dorvillier among others. She also works as a movement assistant for Nicole Beutler in the piece “The Garden”. Parallel to this, she has collaborated in a Dance project in N.Y teaching dance to women victims of domestic violence and at the moment she prepares her next project in Spain.

About Javier Murugarren

Formerly a sea sciences student in the Canary Islands, Javier arrived to the performance world in 1996. A pivotal encounter with El ojo de la Faraona dance company resulted in a decision to pursue performance and movement research. This brought Javier to Amsterdam, where he received a bachelor degree (2008) in dance and choreography from School for New Dance Development (SNDO). Javier’s work draws on a range of performance practices, including improvisation, choreography, cabaret, music, puppetry, video, and costume design. The distinctively eclectic and cross-cultural style of his costume designs has earned them a description as “post-folkloric punk”. Javier understands the performing body as “a mutant tool for an ongoing process of learning and adaptation.” His work has been presented in numerous countries, including Japan, Korea, Hungary, Turkey, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, USA, Spain and the Netherlands. He is a founder member of Instant Collective (2006), an Amsterdam-based performance collective. He also organizes Inkietas, an annual urban performance festival, in his hometown of Estella, in the Basque country of Spain. Other collaborative works have been made with Compaignie faim de siècle / Ibrahim Quraishi (Paris/NY), Trust company (South Korea), Duda Paiva (NL) and Azart-Ship of Fools (NL), Meekers (NL) and Maas (NL)

Soufiane Karim

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French-Moroccan dancer and choreographer Soufiane Karim spent a short residency at Rimbun Dahan in October and November 2013, en route to the Melaka Art + Performance Festival. During his residency, he was developing his next full-length work entitled Kaly-Graffyk. He also collaborated with  New Caledonian hip hop dancer Ludovic Simane Wénéthem and Indonesian dancer Gita Kinanthi (site-specific performance at Rimbun Dahan pictured below).

During his residency, Soufiane was interviewed on Capital FM and on BFM 89.9: https://www.bfm.my/soufiane-karim.html. He also conducted a dance workshop at ASWARA, the national academy for arts and heritage.

All photos below by Leocampo Yuen Hon Wai.

About Soufiane Karim

A young Frenchman of Moroccan origin, aged twenty-eight, Soufiane Karim had been dancing since his early childhood when, at sixteen, he discovered hiphop. The experience was life-changing and, as soon as he had finished studying communication, he launched straight into creating a life of dancing. He learned various dance techniques and styles in Paris and developed a keen interest in hip-hop culture. As he honed his skills, he set up the Boogalizzle group and together they discovered the techniques and magic of show business, winning several battles and contests, including choreography.

He met some good dancers teachers in Paris during his early hip-hop training-the-trainers sessions, and developed a taste for skill transfer and teaching. Pursuing his love of travel, he continued his search, leaving Paris for New Caledonia to attend a three-part training programme organised by French contemporary dancer and pedagogue Mic Guillaumes at the Noumea Centre de Développement Choréographique. Keen to share his travel and new friends, he put together his own solo production, “Sweet Hõm”. In the third unit of the training session, he participated as a trainers’ trainer, while continuing with his plans to develop dancing in New Caledonia and the Pacific. He travelled with several New Caledonian dancers to Vanuatu, Fiji and New Zealand to organise courses and shows. On his return, he decided to set up the Posuë Dance Company. He is now artistic director, dancer, choreographer and teacher of Posuë Dance Company.

The BOW Project

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The BOW Project

In July 2013, Ng Mei-Yin, a Malaysian choreographer based in New York, and Cathy Seago, dancer and dance scholar from the UK, conducted a version of their ongoing performance work, the BOW Project, at Rimbun Dahan. The development concluded with a showing on 12 July 2013 at Damansara Performing Arts Centre.

BOW 2013 brought together choreographers/dancers from different dance forms to workshop together to explore starting points and ways in to dance-making, according to their tradition/practice. The aim was to create a number of short works from shared starting points, and to trace the journey in a meaningful and embodied way.

This was a creative and playful opportunity for inquisitive/ imaginative choreographers to develop their art, their perception and their network. Through exposing, sharing and exploring some of the innate mysteries of dance work with other artists and with a wider community we might find a greater depth to our understanding of dance, our own work and of each other.

Lead artists: Mei-Yin Ng (USA/Malaysia) & Cathy Seago (UK)

Malaysian choreographers: Christine Chew, Maniyarasi Gowindasamy, Rithaudin Abdul Kadir

Music performers: The Music Professional Academy.
Project partner: Damansara Performing Arts Center and ASWARA.

This project is supported by grants from the University of Winchester, MEI-BE WHATever, kakiSeni and JKKN (Jabatan Kebudayaan dan Kesenian Negara).

Lisa Anderson

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Lisa Anderson

tigatiga

Tiga Tiga, video and sculptural installation, Blue Mountains, Australia.

Dr Lisa Anderson works across a broad range of media creating images, films and prints that explore issues of weather and its consequences including the movement of peoples and animals, the shifts in legends and mythology specific to locations, and the effects of climate change in our global environment.

Recent exhibitions include Huldefolke, a photographic series in Skargarstrond, Iceland, working with the mythology and religious beliefs in the unseen or hidden folk, Beneath the Architecture of Beauty which comprised neon and photographs in London, and a sculptural intallation in Beijing, Clouds in the Beijing Breeze, which references childish joy with gifts and the abundance of stories with clouds of gold. Further sculptural work includes a temporary installation work Precious that uses 4,000 wine glasses to use a fairytale ambience to capture water and light in a forest beside the sea in Arhus in Denmark, andTiga Tiga, a video and sculptural installation at Scenic World in the Australian Blue Mountains and in Contested Landscape for Ten Days on the Island, Tasmania. Tiga Tiga will also form a part of the Lorne Sculpture Biennale in 2014.

Anderson exhibits regularly in Sydney, London and Beijing and is included in major private and public collections. Her residencies include Arctic adventures as artist on a Russian icebreaker, as well as exploring UNESCO sites in the Bay of Biscay and, more recently, the Antarctic aboard the MV Fram, travel in remote Australia, Central java, the UK and other sites with weather-specific stories as the stepping point for the works Dr Anderson creates with her company The Shiny Shiny World.

Anderson spent three months at Rimbun Dahan in 2013, creating 3D video pieces for installation in various locations using the unique gardens, water features and dancers of the area in the final work.

Laurence Wood

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Laurence Wood

laurenceVisual Arts Resident, 2013

Biography:

Born in the UK and a graduate of the Royal College of Art, London, Laurence has been working as an artist, curator and visiting academic in Hong Kong. Prior to that he was a Dean at the University for the Creative Arts in the UK. Primarily a painter he also has many years of experience of leading and working with creative teams involved in broader fields of art, architecture, design and music. His work has been exhibited internationally and is included in the collections of the National Trust Foundation for Art UK, HSBC HQ London, and His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales.