Back to Basics Program Lieselotte Vloeberghs Brussels, Belgium Drawing, Mixed media www Lieselotte Vloeberghs is a visual artist from Belgium. Their work departs from belief systems that generate meaning and reality. Motifs from religion, fairytales, science, the natural world and spiritual frameworks find their way into drawings and other media. Abstract theories are playfully explored through tangible figures who navigate diverse thought systems and notions of truth. Lieselotte likes to makes use of materials that are present in the day to day life. The practice of gathering, harvesting and working with things like dust, leafs, mushrooms, her dog’s fur etc, combined with the more classic drawing materials, reveals the physical, spiritual, and political significances of the matter at hand. The often dirty and earthy materials offer physical grounding to the ideas they depict, sometimes resulting in a temporary character. Lieselotte likes to play with the notion of art experience by other creatures, by making work for the sky or the forest or other things and entities. Deborah Harada Kaneohe, USA Writing, Performance www "I'm drawn to layered time in my work." I have loved books and stories and poems since I was a child. Robert Frost and Robert Louis Stevenson clicked into my brain starting when I was six--thank you Mrs. Wells! I was the kid who read her way through the library, carting home books in the daisy basket on the front of my bike. But it took a lot longer for me to claim being a writer. Now I'm happily about to begin my third novel. I'm querying agents with my second and the first is sitting in a drawer. I also teach creative writing and started the Lōʻihi Arts Foundation when Hawaiʻi became my home five years ago. The women in my stories are time travelers in the sense that reconciling the past is the way to their future. But time is a layered construct to reckon with--mysterious, unwieldy, sublime and paradoxical. Unpacking these notions is incredibly gratifying. Chantal Gagnon Edmonton, Canada Painting, Crochet, Installation www Chantal Gagnon is a London-based multi-disciplinary artist, operating as a Reflector, she utilises her lack of fixed internal definition as a creative strength, allowing her work to become a site-specific dialogue with the cities and spaces Chantal traverses and the ancestral memories she inherits. Chantal allows transmission, intuition and transmutation to dictate the resolution of each piece. Chantal’s work is less about control and more about communion with environment, intuition, and emotion. Each colour, each texture, is a response to what is felt but often unspoken. She does not set out to impose meaning, but allows meaning to emerge. Whether through the repetitive, meditative architecture of crochet, the fractured narratives of collage, or the unpredictable fluidity of ink and fire, Chantal’s work explores the way we live and the ways we heal. She embraces the beautiful disasters of the creative process to produce work that reflects not just a personal vision, but a collective state of being.

August Justine Huiying Yuan France Botanical Specimen Art and Drawing, Handmade www "I create with plants as a way of listening — a quiet dialogue between human and nature." I am a botanical artist and founder of Mill’art Y.H.Y.®, based in France. My work begins with growing plants from seeds, observing their life cycles, and transforming them into delicate botanical artworks through pressing, imprinting, and handcraft techniques. I am particularly drawn to the silent language of plants — their textures, rhythms, and quiet resilience. Through my creations, I explore a way of “being with” nature rather than representing it, seeking a state of resonance between human and plant. My practice moves between art, craftsmanship, and sensory experience. I also design workshops and immersive sessions where participants reconnect with nature through touch, observation, and slow making. Rooted in a French aesthetic yet nourished by cross-cultural sensitivity, my work reflects a poetic dialogue between material, time, and life. Mary Ethna Black London, UK Creative writing www "Globe-trotting doctor, writer, much in common with salmon." I am a medical doctor from Northern Ireland and have held senior posts in medicine, social care, academia, government, and the UN, and her experience spans Asia, Australia, Central America, Europe and the USA.I currently sit on climate science boards and chair the MCS Foundation which certifies renewable energy installations in the UK. I am a founding Fellow of Chapter Zero UK and an honorary Professor in the School of Medicine at St Andrews University. A late bloomer in writing, I've recently graduated with an MA from Goldsmiths University in London and have won or been listed for over 30 writing prizes in memos, short fiction and poetry. Residencies? Bundanon, Cill Rialaig, the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, and Varuna. Recurrent themes in my work are migration, oceans, and the search for sanctuary. Splav will be published by Abacus in March 2027. Set in Serbia, this memoir is about finding home in an unstable world. Welcome to coffee, catfish, and chaos. I am now working on my second book. Currach.entwines the Irish diasporic identity, traditional boatbuilding, and basking sharks. Sangeetha Ramirez Amsterdam, Netherlands / Germany Dance, Psychology www Art is often framed as self-expression: the artist conveys an inner world that touches spectators through relatability or political poignancy. What if art is instead a portal for collective opening and transcendence? As a dancer in free improvisation, the "doer" stops doing and I become vessel, beyond time and space. Yet the spectating audience never sat right with me. It's not about the dance, or the music. It's merely an expression of the ineffable. Could art be a condition-maker, stripping the "doer" so presence can ripple out? If removing hiding places is art's job, its measure becomes: how little is left to hide behind? Even improvisation keeps a veil, "this is dance", with an audience. Craft, performance, "dancer" are masks. May the highest art be no mask, not less form, but removal of every role that lets anyone hide? Could someone like a monk, resting and wordlessly transmitting with no role, be the purest artist for transcending hiding? Is the highest art artless art? What then of artful art? A scaffold, not a summit? Was "art" ever more than the name for the ladder?

Janet Chase Norwich, UK Socially engaged performance, Sculpture, Photography www "Janet is reinventing herself, her way." Grief has fuelled a feminist rupture, where personal loss intersects with identity, silence, and the roles I once inhabited. My multidisciplinary approach reflects the hypercathected, emotional energy, being withdrawn and redirected during this process, allowing space for uncertainty, restlessness, and quiet remodelling. The gendered gaze, patriarchal indoctrination and positioning as an objectified other have pushed my practice beyond self, opening questions about how women’s lives are seen. Performance, photography and digital sculpture have become materials to test out new forms of being, where costumes, gesture and familiar objects allow for playful identificatory remoulding, rather than repair. Through this work, my personal transformation becomes a way to ask broader questions about women’s roles in society, ageing and the necessity to actively grieve. I am carving out new space for myself as both artist and individual, refusing to return to the version of myself, that no longer exists. Douglas Flowe USA History www I am an Associate Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis, where I study the intersections of race, crime, and urban life in the United States. My work focuses especially on the experiences of Black men in the early twentieth century, examining how they navigated the criminal legal system and how their lives were represented in courts and public discourse. I am the author of Uncontrollable Blackness: African American Men and Criminality in Jim Crow New York (2020), and my current book project, American Darkness, explores Black men’s experiences in New York’s Jim Crow prisons. Alison Neighbour Newport, UK Scenography, Performance, Installation www Alison is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work spans performance, scenography, sculpture, installation and walking journeys. Her practice is rooted in deeply felt responses to place, and she seeks to explore how we might re-imagine our human relationship with the rest of the living world, with a focus on participation and the embodied experience of the audience/viewer. Her work invites audiences to reflect on natural processes of change and the bigger systems that we are part of; fostering awareness and empathy, and evoking gentle calls to action that connect art, environment, and community.

Santiago Pereson Buenos Aires, Argentina Music, Sound, Noises www "Dressing sound" I'm an experimental musician and programmer from Buenos Aires, now living in Madrid. started writing experimental music in the first years of the 90's, after a decade of studying music theory and writing instrumental songs that were decent but not really satisfying to me or memorable to others. I felt the need to distance ideas from direct actions, that my hands always went to the same well-known places, harmonies and forms. By adding an additional layer of indirection, inventing methods and rules instead of improvising musical ideas "by ear", I was able to represent what I was trying to create in a much better way. Thirtysomething years later I'm writing for chamber orchestra, coding artificial composers, improvising with sounds collected from the places I discover. It has been an amazing trip, but now it's time to find new paths, to change again, to rediscover the joy in new ideas. Maybe it's about places and their shape, or about electricity, transistors and patch cables. Maybe it's about words and not sounds, or simply walking around, feeling the world for a while. Angela Fragkou Athens, Greece New Media, Bioart, New Biomaterials www "Creating new materialities to imagine ecological futures" I am a PhD artist, researcher & Bioscientist often using biosciences and digital technologies for my artistic research. My approach to individual artistic activity can be described mainly with the term “experimentation”. It is the “shaping” that takes place between art and science to organize and shape the world’s interpretive process. I use real scientific methodologies and experimental processes arrived from bio sciences, as a solid ground for my artistic work where real data, invented parameters, ecological issues and societal values, are forced to collaboration in the alternate story of a sustainable future. Therefore, I examine the interface between the person and the surrounding world, by using scientific processes, altered and modified, under the prism of artistic creation. Have participated in many scientific European research projects as a research fellow, giving lectures on interdisciplinary issues and attend many conferences. Exhibitions, workshops, publications, and collaborative projects are among my recent activities. Tom Gurn Yartapuulti/Port Adelaide, Australia Writing, Poorly-drawn Comics www "Where does play end and art begin? - Agnes Varda" I tend to write about people I meet, things I see, or general happenings both in my life and at large. I love theatre and film and have delved into those mediums from time-to-time, but that's mostly borne in my belief that stories are stories are stories. I know that we are all born storytellers to some degree. Personally, I can't remember to put the bins out or to reply to emails in a timely manner, but if something strange or funny happens I've somehow got every detail down pat for decades. I just try to cultivate that in my work, and have a bit of fun with it. See the list of all the Arteles residents here