CuratorSpace Artist Bursary #30
The CuratorSpace Artist Bursary is a quarterly award to support contemporary artists to develop their practice. The artists selected for CuratorSpace Artist Bursary #30 are Anna Li, Ziyan Liu, Alison Lowry and Dominika Jackowska. Their projects span installation, animation, projection mapping, sculpture, photography, textiles, and performance.
Rewiring: Women, Menopause, and Transformation is a multidisciplinary exhibition by Alison Lowry that examines lived experiences of peri-menopause and menopause through photography, performance, and sculpture. Rooted in her own personal journey, the exhibition seeks to reframe cultural associations of menopause, exploring both its biological and emotional realities, while challenging entrenched societal attitudes that have long silenced women at this transformative stage of life. In this way, Rewiring reimagines menopause as a potent stage of life: liberating, creative, and life-affirming.
Dominika Jackowska's project, Exploring Senses Through Tactile Sculpture involves the fabrication of a large sculptural installation, combining metalwork with interactive and sensory elements. Collaborating with the NEUK Collective (a neurodivergent artist group), they will test how the work feels in terms of texture and durability, opening up the artwork to audiences who engage through touch and other sensory experiences. The project will embed accessibility throughout to question traditional artistic boundaries and reimagine sculpture as a fully immersive encounter.
The Average Crip is a contemporary art project by Anna Li that critically examines the concept of the "average body" through disability, feminism, and visual culture. The project takes its starting point from Adolphe Quetelet's 19th-century theory of the "Average Man," which laid the foundations for statistical science while producing normative ideals of health, beauty, and productivity that continue to shape contemporary society. Using digital composites made from her oil paintings, watercolours, drawings, and photographs of her own disabled body, she constructs fragmented, speculative bodily landscapes, which are presented in illuminated lightboxes and viewed through suspended, hand-crocheted lace panels.
Ziyan Liu's project Experimental Textiles for a Posthuman Ecology: let the textiles happen sits between biomimicry and posthuman art and design, using textile practice as a way to critically examine how contemporary industrial systems produce textiles from an anti-colonial perspective. Rather than imposing predetermined form or outcome, the work treats textiles as responsive, living systems that emerge through interaction. The project is led by environmentally responsible natural materials and developed through experimental knitting and machine training. Through this posthuman approach to textile practice, the work seeks to position textiles as active participants in making, capable of responding to material behaviour, machine operation, and environmental conditions.
You can find out more about the CuratorSpace Artist Bursary and how to apply at bursary.curatorspace.com.
Image credit: Alison Lowry, 35 I cant's, 2017. Collaborative video work featuring a performance by Jayne Cherry. Filmed by Stuart Calvin.
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