CuratorSpace Artist Bursary #28

The CuratorSpace Artist Bursary is a quarterly award that supports contemporary artists working across a wide range of disciplines, helping them to test new ideas and develop their practice. The artists selected for CuratorSpace Artist Bursary #28 are Caitriona Dunnett, Natalia Janula, Emanuela Cusin, and Holly Foskett-Barnes. Their projects span photography, sculpture, performance, and socially engaged practice and each artist is using the bursary to explore new materials, processes, and ways of connecting with audiences.

Caitriona Dunnett is a visual artist whose work explores memory, place, and family history through alternative photographic and textile processes. Her current project centres on Loch Long in Arrochar, Scotland, where generations of her family lived and worked. Using methods such as solargraphy, cyanotype, and contact printing, she incorporates plant materials gathered from the landscape to tone and dye her prints. She now plans to develop this work by printing family photographs on reclaimed hotel bedding and embroidering them with thread dyed from locally foraged plants. Through this process, she aims to deepen her connection to the landscape, develop new skills in natural dyeing and embroidery, and create a body of work that weaves together personal history and ecological practice.

Natalia Janula is a queer Polish-born artist based in St Leonards whose multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, moving image, installation, photography, and performance. Their work explores the intersections of synthetic and organic materials, often combining silicone, latex, 3D prints, found objects, and kinetic components to create immersive, research-led environments. With a focus on speculative design, hybridity, and post-functional objects, Janula constructs fictional or symbolic spaces that question systems of value, labour, and domestic ritual. Their upcoming exhibition in Italy will revisit one of their previous past installations, a fictional BnB, through new kinetic sculptures and speculative cutlery. The project will support their continued exploration of metalwork, engraving, and programming, and further develop their interest in collaborative, cross-disciplinary methods and the affective potential of constructed environments.

Emanuela Cusin is a Cambridge-based visual artist whose practice spans sculpture, cameraless photography, and time-based installation. Her ongoing project Breaking Point explores collapse and repair through the slow disintegration of concrete cubes, staging a durational performance that reveals the material and emotional weight of failure. In its next phase, she will reassemble these fragments using infrastructure materials like tar, bitumen, and thermoplastic road markings, shifting away from symbolic or aestheticised repair towards a raw visual language that echoes contemporary social and structural breakdown. By fusing sculptural form with performance and focusing on transformation rather than restoration, Cusin creates work that is intimate yet socially resonant, reflecting on fragility, endurance, and care.

Holly Foskett-Barnes is a Bristol-based interdisciplinary artist working across performance, sculpture, storytelling, and participatory workshops. Her project Telling The Bees draws on the Celtic tradition of informing bees of major life events to explore themes of ecology, grief, and collective memory. At its centre is a hand-gilded beehive, temporarily installed in community gardens across Bristol as a sculptural gathering point for performances and workshops. Through storytelling, song, and creative engagement, participants will be invited to reflect on love, loss, and their relationship to the natural world. Rooted in site-responsive, co-creative practice, the work reframes public green spaces as places for cultural exchange, wellbeing, and intergenerational learning.

You can find out more about the CuratorSpace Artist Bursary and how to apply at bursary.curatorspace.com.

Image credit: Caitriona Dunnett, The Range, Arrochar, Scotland, Cyanotype toned with plants from Loch Long.

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