Back to Basics Program Harry Lochhead Melbourne, Australia Music www I make music for the fun of it, out of curiosity and excitement at what I might find. For me, the process is grounded in play and intuition, following what feels surprising and sounds cool. In this way I get to enter or create new worlds, feelings, and experiences. Wading into the mystery, swimming around, occasionally making contact with something beyond. It really is a good time. Dee Gibson Glen Margaret, Canada Drawing, Installation, Performance www "Currently, Dee Gibson is interested in exploring the connections between the ageing female body and the natural environment through the lens of attentive introspection" My art practice is deeply tied to place. I spend a lot of time walking and pay particular attention to things that are unseen yet sensed or that happen on the periphery of my awareness. In my work, I create experiences based on my perceived sense of an environment and explore the connections between the natural environment and attentive introspection. Repetitive and laborious processes have become a way to access a contemplative state, as well as a way to connect and build community. I am drawn to common, everyday materials that often have varying degrees of translucency, impermanence and inherently ghostly qualities. I prefer to use media that shift, dissolve, disintegrate or corrupt with time so as to highlight our ephemeral presences and the subtle shifts in humanity within environments. For the residency at Arteles, I will explore themes of aging, the human spirit and the natural world, using drawing, ritual and performative elements to create site-specific installations. Lu Xiong Toronto, Canada Writing, Culinary, Book publishing "I often say the most by leaving something unsaid." Writing has followed a meandering path. I began in graduate school, reading literature, then cofounded a company where ideas took material form through design, made-to-order products, and a brand. Both led me back to words themselves, to lingering over and grinding away at them until something felt true. I believe emotion reaches us in fragments and that short prose may best record a truth. Drawing from Nietzsche, Benjamin, Barthes, and the Chinese xiaopin wen tradition, I favor intimacy, digression, and attentiveness over narrative continuity. My last book explored time through walks, meals, marginalia, and seasonal change. A livre de chevet, it joined prose, calligraphy, and book design for unhurried reading. My current work centers on vegetables. I grew up in southern China’s lake region, where variety was part of daily life. After moving to the US and Canada, their absence made me attentive to what was left behind and what surrounds me now. Through writing and culinary experiences, I explore remembered and local ingredients and how food can feel familiar and foreign.

September Rodrigo Ribeyro São Paulo, Brazil Film/Cinema "The city is nature upside down." Rodrigo Ribeyro is a filmmaker graduated at the Academia Internacional de Cinema of São Paulo and the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia. His first short fiction film, Cantareira, won awards at the La Cinef competition of the 74th Festival de Cannes and at the main brazilian festivals. In 2025, he was selected for La Résidence of Festival de Cannes with his first feature film project, Muganga, and also joined the Locarno Filmmakers Academy. In 2026, he was selected for Berlinale Talents. Raised in the Serra da Cantareira forest, his work investigates the sensory relations between city, nature, and work. He has also collaborated with the Cinema do Brasil program in the international promotion of Brazilian cinema, participating in festivals such as Cannes, Berlinale, Locarno, San Sebastián, Busan, Guadalajara, Rotterdam, and Ventana Sur. Jesse Moussy France Photography, Sculpture, Writing "I make work from whatever I can’t seem to leave alone." I’m a French, Brisbane-based visual artist working mainly with photography, sculpture and installation. I started with portrait photography, moved towards landscapes, and have gradually become more interested in what I think of as anti-portraiture, suggesting a person or an emotional state without necessarily showing the person themselves. My work often comes from a lot of thinking, observing and writing, and I’m interested in the relationship between identity, intimacy, memory and the spaces we inhabit. I like working with ordinary, sometimes domestic objects and giving them a different weight. Photography, text and objects often overlap in my practice, and I enjoy letting one medium lead me towards another rather than deciding everything beforehand. I’m interested in work that feels intimate, slightly unexpected, and maybe a little uncomfortable. I want my work to be something you can stumble across rather than something that always needs to be searched for, explained or scrolled past. Lucky McIntyre New York City, USA Writing, Performance, Film www "Lucky McIntyre (he/him) is a queer trans dancer-turned-drag king from NYC writing his first memoir - What I Did For Love." Lucky McIntyre is a queer Manhattan-based writer, performer, and psychotherapist. Grounded in curiosity, he writes about transformation through travel, creativity, and love—especially where tenderness and risk meet, and love becomes a lived practice. Born and raised in Downstate New York by a ballerina and a drummer, Lucky is deeply influenced by music and dance. With 30 years of dance-theatre training and performance across styles, he believes everyone is a Dancer and the revolution benefits from everybody reclaiming this innate human act. His current work explores the intersection of dance and performance, identity and belonging, and the things we do for love. He is the recipient of the Motive 4 Artists! Residency to create his first one man show, holds a BA in Environmental Studies and Dance, a MA in Somatic Psychology, and is named a Top 5 NYC Drag King as his alter ego Sly Saturn - the Dancing King of New York. He is a proud autistic trans-masc lesbian dedicated to supporting his community as a healer in his licensed private practice Sit With Sol Therapy.

Dominique Somers Antwerpen, Belgium Photography, Multimedia, Writing www "A chance alignment / held just long enough / to be pressed into light" My practice can be characterized as a form of research in which I probe into the relationship of visual media to (deep) time, ephemeral phenomena, and the mechanisms of controlled observation and registration. During my residency, I want to work on Ground Variations, a project that stems from my interest in alternative forms of cartography. Traditional maps mainly describe a place through topography and boundaries. Many elements that also characterize a landscape remain outside the frame: atmospheric conditions, rhythms of light, subtle ecological processes, or acoustic properties. I will explore how a place can be approached through forms of artistic countermapping, in which photography, written notes, drawings, and field recordings function as ways to register and interpret these often invisible characteristics of a landscape. Ground Variations connects to ideas that historically base navigation on moving and temporary phenomena. At Arteles, I want to explore this further by means of approaching the environment as a dynamic constellation of processes, traces and stories. Chao Wang Hangzhou, China Painting, Drawing, Printmaking www "YOU ARE BUGS" Chao Wang is a contemporary artist whose practice explores microsystems shaped by fungi and insects, forms of life that exist at the edge of human perception yet quietly sustain the world. Working across painting, printmaking, and drawing, she investigates how these organisms overlap, intertwine, and construct unseen relationships within shared environments. Her compositions are built through repetition, mutation, and accumulation. Through material and process, she translates invisible ecological systems into tactile and visual experiences. In her daily life, Wang often practices yoga or plays tennis before beginning her studio hours, using movement and physical activity to build energy and prepare herself for creative work. She also enjoys hiking and immersing herself in the embrace of forests and nature, where she finds inspiration through direct encounters with the natural environments that inform her artistic practice. Ben Davis Corning, NY, USA Photography, Bookbinding, Video www Ben Davis’s (b. 1994) creative practice engages different representations of time to reflect on family history and the weight of unspoken struggles, whether that takes the form of a self-paced book or the flashing flicker of a film. Using photography, video, collage, and handmade artist books, he explores themes of inherited conditions, shared visual languages, and the materiality of images through a combination of digital and analog processes. The family archive is a frequent collaborator, a tool for both inspiration and connection to dead family members. Occasionally, he incorporates figures from popular culture and found ephemera, such as silk flowers, into his work to comment on larger cycles of addiction and grief. Ben holds an MFA from the University of Arizona with a focus on Photography, Video, and Imaging, as well as a BFA in Fine Art Photography and a BS in Biomedical Photography from Rochester Institute of Technology.

Molly Hankinson Glasgow, UK Painting, Murals, Drawing, Public intervention, Installation www I am a UK-based artist from London living in Glasgow, Scotland. My work interrogates ideas of safety, space, and perception, weaving personal and collective experiences into playful, emotive, and energetic artworks. My practice spans studio painting, murals, and other urban interventions, and more recently I’ve been leaning into abstraction as a form of release and exploration. Overall, I’m particularly interested in how my work can evoke a feeling, offer comfort, and serve as sites of power. Wenlin Wang Paris, France / Taiwan Hand-Torn Collage, Painting, Sculpture www "A rightful place for every sign." Born and raised in Tainan, Taiwan, and currently based in Paris, I find myself discovering what the objects in my hands want to become, without limiting their potential. I shape space as an active element of the works, and detail as a fragmentation of the image. Journeying through the space of each piece to rediscover the meaning of a story inscribed within a graphic poetry, I explore the relationship between painting and sculpture. Lisette Frimannslund Bergen, Norway Drawing, Photo-painting, Writing www I grew up in Bergen, Norway and now live and work in The Hague, The Netherlands. Before receiving my Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Royal Academy of Art The Hague I received a Master of Science in Industrial Design Engineering from TUDelft. My proces is often very research based, and in my work I combine elements of photography, painting, drawing and writing; often in the form of an itinerary, a travelogue through time, place or mind. I love long distance bike packing and a good book, although not at the same time, preferably. Zoë Backwell Dundalk, Ireland Music, Writing, Visual arts I’m an Irish musician, singer-songwriter, and performer with a background in classical violin, research, and broadcast production. I’m turning to the Back to Basics residency to tune out the noise and bombardment of modern life so I can tune into my own voice again. I’m curious how the atmosphere and quiet of the Finnish forest can inform my work. Writing, art, and music have always been a way for me to process my experiences and make sense of the world. As an emerging solo artist, my intention is to slow down, trust my intuition, and give myself permission to create without judgment. Alongside my music, I look forward to leaning into photography, drawing, cycling, deep listening, and spending time in nature - reconnecting with the pure joy of making things when it’s just for me. See the list of all the Arteles residents here