3 month live-work studio residency in Amsterdam from 2010-2014, including travel costs and bursary.

Lisa Castagner - Elaine, 2012 (film still)
Lisa Castagner – Elaine, 2012 (film still)

Organised with M4Gastatelier, Going Dutch allowed a visual or crafts artist living in England, at any stage of their career, to make a new body of work in an artist-led studio in Amsterdam.

The award included:

  • a bursary of £1,200
  • return airfare
  • a free live/work studio space for 3 months at M4Gastatelier and
  • funding towards a public-facing event about their work and experiences on their return.

Selected artists were asked to produce three articles about their experiences for our website: updates on work produced, galleries visited, or a general overview of life in Amsterdam for artists.

2014: Lisa Castagner

Lisa Castagner is an artist-filmmaker and photographer living in London. Castagner did a residency in Iceland in 2011, where she responded to the life and poetry of a little-known female fisherwoman through a video piece.  Her new series, ‘Hidden Self-Portraits’ revisits Victorian baby portraits, also known as ‘hidden mother’ images, where the artist positions herself as the hidden mother, holding the offspring of her friends and family.

In a series of two interviews, Lisa spoke with Anika Schwarzlose about Chukotka Projects, gentrification, funding and the art world in Amsterdam. She also spoke with Jeffrey Babcock, cultural activist and alternative cinema programmer in Amsterdam, about the historical and cultural context of alternative initiatives in the city.

2011: Sion Parkinson

Sion Parkinson is a Mighty Engine (2011)
Sion Parkinson – A Mighty Engine

Sion Parkinson, who is based at London, combines sculpture, text and voice in his work.

Sion presented a new body of artworks and poetry in a closing event, which he had completed during his three month stay in M4gastatelier. A series of multicoloured waste mould casts, water bird torsos and carnal red screen prints of an orificial mother and son act as crude props to the beginnings of Parkinson’s prose poem about a swan strangler. Parkinson gave a short reading and talk, A carve up of all the birds of poetry, followed by an one-off performance with designer and musician Sam de Groot.

2010: David Murphy

We Could Co-operate (2010)
We Could Co-operate (2010)

Much of Murphy’s work deals with the relationship of land and water, and it situates itself frequently in the impermanent, edgeless territory between these two. He sees these front areas as sites of contention, fought for spaces, keeping in and keeping out, attack and defence. Almost Island – a literal translation of ‘Peninsula’ – has its investigative origins in the area called ‘Doggerland’ – the name given to the landmass that once provided a land bridge between the UK and the Netherlands. It sits nowadays under the North Sea, an enormous sandbank containing the remains of monkeys, elephants and lions, long-since obscured by rising sea-levels and changing geography. It is also said that the River Thames was once a tributary of the Rhine, and that this great river cut right through ‘Doggerland’ before it continued its course out into the Channel. His interest for this quasi-mythical landscape formed the basis of Murphy’s stay at M4gastatelier.

In his lecture and exhibition We Could Cooperate, Murphy investigates the ways in which a landscape is manipulated through human activity, and how the threats and possibilities of nature are resisted, managed and utilized.

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