Artists in Residence

Gardner & Gardner

Artist duo Gardner & Gardner have been appointed as the University of Stirling Artists in Residence for the 2024-25 academic year.
Heidi Gardner and Peter Gardner are a husband-and-wife artist duo, working under the name Gardner & Gardner.

Coming from different disciplines, Heidi from History of Art and Peter from Theology, over two decades they have built up a multi-disciplinary art practice. Their practice responds to community environments, and they share a commitment to listening as an artistic discipline.

Gardner & Gardner will work with the Art Collection during their themed year ‘Human Experience’ in which exhibitions will be exploring topics such as climate crisis, displacement and COVID-19, with an emphasis on the human need for creativity and community to build our resilience.

The artists intend to set up the Faculty of Taking Notice, a temporary, fictitious faculty which will exist for one academic year. Through a series of playful actions and interventions, the Faculty of Taking Notice will observe, explore, research, and encourage the narrative of campus as a neighbourhood. Engaging with students and staff, they will offer these creative acts as a catalyst for conversation and co-creation, nurturing the practice of taking notice, of neighbourliness, as a form of care for people, place, and planet.

Visit Gardner & Gardner's website.

Gardner and Gardner stood next to each other

Audrey Grant

In the 2023/24 academic year, Audrey Grant has been the University Artist in Residence.  Throughout her residency she has interrogated the landscape, uncovering undiscovered aspects of a parkland whose primary function is now as a university institution, but whose landscape contains the echoes of the lives of those who have lived and worked within its boundaries.

Developed over her year-long residency, her exhibition Memoria considers and responds to the visible and invisible traces left in the landscape of the historic Airthrey Estate through various media: photography, film, paint and sculpture. Some of her works will remain as part of the Collection. 

Audrey Grant grew up in Grangemouth and lives and works in Edinburgh. She is an award-winning painter whose practice includes drawing, photography, and installation.

Visit Audrey's website.

Audrey sitting on a bench in a garden with a tree behind them

Jennifer Wicks

In 2022, Jennifer Wicks looked at the work of Norman McLaren, held in the University Archive and the Art Collection, exploring his pioneering innovations with sound and image.

McLaren’s interests lay in the visual translation of music, the phenomenology of sound, and image, and the philosophy around perception; one of his underlying concerns was movement, “movement that is drawn, not drawings that move”. He also drew directly onto the soundtrack of the film to create an innovative sort of electronic, optical-graphical music, he essentially produced sound out of drawings. Alongside his hand-drawn films, he experimented with stereoscopic films and drawings and went on to work with dancers and choreographers.

The residency was generously supported by Creative Scotland and allowed Jennifer to develop a new body of work exploring themes surrounding sound and image, the materiality of film and visualising music. This work culminated in an exhibition entitled Technical Notes and four works from the exhibition were subsequently gifted to the Art Collection by Jennifer Wicks.

Jenny Wicks

Alan Dimmick

Anniversary Photographer in Residence 

Alan Dimmick was the Artist in Residence 2017-2018. The project was a 12-month photography residency during the course of the University’s 50th anniversary year.  Aligned to the anniversary calendar, the photographer’s brief was to capture a ‘Portrait of the Campus and the era’ in contrast with 1967-8, exploring the unique natural, built and human environment of the University.

Dimmick is fascinated by the everyday social and cultural life of Scotland and has created a unique visual resource of documentary significance which was exhibited in GOMA in 2013.  In 2017 he exhibited his body of work at Stills Gallery in Edinburgh. 

The University Art Collection was eager that this project recorded the modern history of the University.  Whilst the University archive and art collection holds a collection of fine photographs from the early days of the University in the 1960s and 70s, relatively little had been done to document and explore the changing physical and human landscape of the campus in recent decades. The Photographer has contributed to redressing this balance.

All images now form part of the University archive, creating a rich artistic, contemporary record of the rhythm of life on campus, bringing up to date the historic photographic material already held in our collections. The Art Collection purchased some works by Alan Dimmick.

Visit Alan's website.

Alan Dimmick

Ally Wallace

Ally Wallace worked as Artist in Residence at the University of Stirling’s Pathfoot Building 2016-2017 on a self-initiated project made possible by a Creative Scotland grant. He made work focused on Pathfoot’s modernist architecture in relation to the art collection housed in it, the surrounding landscape and the people who use the building. Two works by Ally Wallace were purchased by the Art Collection.

View more of Ally's work on his website.

Ally Wallace