This fall marks the Peter Bullough Foundation's (PBF) third year of visiting artists. We’re quite pleased to kick off our fall season with nine artists that represent an extremely broad range of practices and backgrounds. Each will bring something unique to the Winchester community and we look forward to sharing Winchester with them.
Community practice plays a large role for two of our artists, Mary Welcome and Pangea Kali Virga, who will both be visiting in September. Welcome describes herself as a “cultural worker collaborating with remote landscapes and rural communities.” Part artist, part activist, her work explores equity and inclusivity, queerness and imagination. Social responsibility is also crucial to Kali Virga’s work as she hopes to create a more sustainable and equitable fashion and art industry. Their fiber art tells a story, weaving upcycled and refuse-sourced material to create wall hangings, installations, and site-specific garments. Both look forward to discourse with the surrounding area.
We have a number of writers visiting this season as well, poet and prose writer Hannah Oberman-Breindel will be visiting beginning in August and writers Kasia Merrill and Julia Lucas will be in residence beginning in November. These three writers have much in common with one another, as Oberman-Breindel and Merrill both explore history and family record, while Lucas and Oberman-Breindel have a background in sports with the former having been a professional runner and the latter having covered both the WNBA and NWSL. While their forms vary from poetry and prose (Oberman-Breindel) to braided narrative (Merrill) to nonfiction (Lucas), all are united in playing an active role in their existing communities, from teaching, to hosting residencies, to coaching.
Recent RISD graduates Henry Roundtrip Marton Newman and Jinghong Chen will begin their residencies in October. Newman is a sculptor, working with found objects and light, exploring the space between memory and the physical world. Chinese-born artist Jinghong Chen’s work also explores in-between states: East and West, youth and maturity, and the limbo of longing for home. Her work takes the form of paper cuttings, book art, illustrations, and installations.
Finally, we have artists Ilyn Wong and Sarah Thompson, who arrive in August and September, respectively. Both keep a multidisciplinary practice, though in very different areas. Taiwanese-American Wong is a visual artist and writer based in Berlin and is the co-founder and director of SAP space. Her work explores family histories and the grief inherent in our multispecies entanglements. Thompson is a fine craft, assemblage and experimental photography artist exploring memory and resiliency. Her work draws on the welding skills she learned over the course of 8 years in the United States Air Force working as a vehicle body mechanic. She ran a reclaimed wood and salvaged metal business before pursuing a BFA.
We look forward to everything this season of artists will explore in their time at the PBF! For those interested in future residency opportunities, please subscribe to our newsletter and watch for application announcements in August and January.
From left to right, top to bottom: Mary Welcome, Pangea Kali Virga, Hannah Oberman-Breindel, Kasia Merrill, Julia Lucas, Henry Roundtrip Marton Newman, Jinghong Chen, Ilyn Wong, and Sarah Thompson.