Meet the 2024 Emergent resident and shortlist

Emergent is a hybrid residency and bursary programme delivered in collaboration with Baltic Centre for Contemporary Arts, Gateshead. Each year, the award is given to an emerging disabled artist with a socially-engaged practice and a small cohort of shortlisted artists are offered tailored support. This year's recipient of the three month residency and £5k bursary is Kerolaina Linkeviča.

Learn more about Emergent Back to Emergent 2024

The applications

With the Emergent programme now in its third year, we were thrilled to once again receive almost 100 high quality applications. Year on year, the pool of applicants interested in the opportunity strengthens and diversifies, and we are grateful to each artist for the time they spend crafting their submissions. It does, however, make the shortlisting and selection process hard: there are just so many incredible artists with whom we would want to work and offer support. 

We continued to select a shortlist informed by learnings from previous iterations of Emergent. Each year, we find the barriers faced by artists as well as the pressures on their careers at this moment in time evolve and so the programme follows suit. Our priorities for supporting artists remain centred around building sustainable careers, integrating accessible solutions, and connecting artists to mentors and networks from which they may benefit.

It's always a shame that we aren't able to work with all applicants whenever we run open callouts, but we deeply value the effort and creative brilliance of all artists who submit applications. Whether through Emergent now or in the future, or a different area of our programme, we try our best to find ways to support as many artists as we can. 

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The resident: Keroliana Linkeviča

2024's Emergent residency and bursary has been awarded to Kerolaina Linkeviča.

Kerolaina was born in Daugavpils, Latvia and migrated to the UK at ten years old. Their childhood was deeply rooted in the forest, animism, magic, and a multiverse of computer games, all of which informs their art practice in the UK today. Laīna's work expresses and explores imaginary worlds, symbiotic entities, alternative subcultures, and virtual environments; each personifying a range of theories, mythos, and emotional histories, continuously evolving through the ecology of their imagination. Laīna seeks to inspire others to explore their inner worlds through tangible making, immersive questing, and generative play, enabling the creative apparatus of personal transformation that may be discovered, actuating more creative agency in our metamorphic lives.

Photograph of an installation artwork. Centre of a dark room, lit by blue neon lights, long curtains hang down from a high ceiling. They are decorated with shiny, wavy lines in abstract layouts. The silhouette of a person appears up high, lit with the same hues. On the floor, surrounded by the curtains, are multiple abstract sculptures of varied heights, made with some kind of dark, textured clay-like material and forming wobbly and uneven structures.

Kerolaina's work installed at Fact Liverpool; Credit: Rob Battersby (@rjbattersby). 

The shortlist

Oscar Marcus Boyle

oscar is cookin' up some work about Bread - Big Bright drawings: fun ruins, and crumblin' and fractured, like those fresco parts pulled off of some pompeiian's wall, which Andy.M texted over Some Time Ago. And ground up wheat in oil paint on an old breadboard. how can an image make connections even broken up [with history and its co-pilots] when words won't do OR if they do what are they actually made up of right now? he always ate the bread but started making the stories by accident: conversations turn into cycles of thought (Alchemy) and cycles of thought into being unable not to talk about it somehow. even if that's from more conversations, or  asking everyone at the Bowls Club to hum and then leaving with a bin-bag full of rattling tins. do you/we do something after the art's gone home? (c. Lispector saying something about photographs of perfume, Celan saying something about snow and wheat and memories). oscar lives in Glasgow and loves it there/there could be too much rain, fewer motorways. <riding off into the sunset on a horse-drawn-bendy-bus>

an oil pastel drawing on cardboard. The scene, depicted in landscape format, centres a now disused bread shop, called

Bread Tree Puts the Bakery Out of Business, Oscar Marcus Boyle. Courtesy of the artist.

Maya Rose Edwards

Maya Rose Edwards is a participatory public sculptor. They have worked in participatory settings for five years, creating ambitious public interventions with communities and their landscapes. In 2023, completing the Mount Stuart Artists Residency, their project TWOFOLD explored the connection between queer and rural identities on the Isle of Bute, resulting in a series of permanent, site-specific works. They are currently undertaking a 14-month placemaking commission along Stranraer's abandoned waterfront, co-designing an ecological-focused future landmark with communities along a post-industrial coastline. They are the recipient of the RSA New Contemporaries Selection 2023 for which they received the Chalmers Award, Creative Scotland Youth Arts Bursary 2022, Steven Palmer Travel Bursary 2023, and have just installed an interactive public artwork as part of the 13th edition of Sculpture in the City, supported by the City of London.

photograph of a wooden kissing gate sat atop a wide, low plinth installed in an urban street environment. A car passes by on the road behind the artwork.

Kissing Gate 2024, Sculpture in the City 13th Edition, London, Maya Rose Edwards. Courtesy of the artist.

Liberty Hodes

Liberty Hodes is a multi-disciplinary artist and facilitator based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, primarily working in performance-making, video and sculpture. They work in a way which is fizzy and ideas-first, often stemming from a desire to embody and enact the non-human. Liberty's work often adopts the language of British Folk Culture and is pre-occupied by a sense of place and how humans see ourselves reflected in the landscape as it changes through demolition and re-building. They are interested in using historical tropes of performance to explore contemporary experiences.

photograph of a performance in public at night, taking place in what appears to be an underpass, lit with neon-hued lights. Four performers stand in a crescent shape, facing where we assume the audience to be. They are each dressed in a costume resembling a large rock or stone in different shapes and sizes, but all covering all of their bodies excluding their faces, which poke out from a hole near the top.

Image credit Racheal Deakin. Courtesy of the artist.

Romi Sarfarty

Romi Sarfaty is a contemporary performance and visual artist. Her work is inspired by worlds of mythology and make-belief, associative streams of consciousness, iconography, and a raw, unashamed state of mind. In Romi's practice, she works with abstraction, absurdity, and melodrama. She is drawn to present, embody, and celebrate things in their most extreme, grotesque form. Romi's research delves into neurodivergent thinking, playing with and re-arranging what exists in reality with an attention to what it triggers in the mind.

Inspired by psycho-magic and sustainable practices, Romi crafts her own costumes and sets, considering the visual the most crucial way of communicating. Her movement and writing practice are driven by body-mind frequencies and urges, inspired by Butoh, body-weather, and body-archive philosophies. Romi considers craft-making and use of bodies as forms of visual communication, aspiring to generate content that is authentic and led by the state of the self and its surroundings.

Photograph of a performance. On a dark platform or stage, lit centrally by a magenta-hued light, are two performers in costumes resembling very exaggerated dolls, with large round breasts and triangle bikinis. Their faces - which are masks - have huge eyes and tongues that stick out and down incredibly long. They are kneeling side by side on top of a black and white spiral motif laid on the platform. They are both holding their larger-than-life heads between their hands, as though grabbing at their hair by their ears - mimicking the gesture which is commonly understood to signal

 Image credit Jessy Earl. Courtesy of the artist.

The Emergent programme is supported by the Fenton Trust.

The Fenton Arts Trust logo

Banner image: photographic portrait of the artist, courtesy of the artist. Credit: Chaos Magic Space/Francis Slip (@sirfrancisslip). Description: a landscape photograph of the artist sat at a dark table against a black backdrop. On the table stands a dark, abstract sculpture made of wobbly arches that climb up, the form narrowing as it rises. Laina, with cropped bright blue hair and matching eyeliner, is looking intently at the work as they touch and hold some of its arches - perhaps affixing or mending part of the sculpture.

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