The Leonardo Fellowship fellows benefit from a year-long residency with the Digital Transformations Hub, supported by student volunteers and staff.
We support the artist-in-residence by providing full access to the Hub's resources. They work with our student volunteers on digital media based projects and provide specialist assistance to users.
Ryan Heath, September 2019 - present
Ryan Heath is a Nottingham based artist who received his BA in Fine Art from Nottingham Trent University in 2017. He works with painting, sculpture and new media. Heath is also a BACKLIT studio artist and former member of Chaos Magic, an artist-led project space in the city.
His work explores mark making and manipulation, in the material and simulated sense. He revives lost and hidden markings from the urban landscape and reinvents their purpose or meaning through graphical painting and world building. In doing this focuses on the way possible narratives are gained and lost through symbolism and abstraction.
Through the Leonardo Fellowship, Ryan Heath will be working with the help of a team of DTH student volunteers on an installation and animated short for virtual reality, presenting an unexplainable phenomenon in a post-industrial landscape known as ‘The Thinning’.
The Thinning will be exhibited at the Broadway Gallery from 6-14 December 2019.
Ryan’s team will be sharing insights into his work and updates about projects throughout the year on Digital Dialogues.
Visit Ryan Heath's website
Aja Ireland, January 2018 - June 2019
Aja Ireland is an interdisciplinary artist who creates immersive audience interactions and participatory experiences with diverse audiences. Alongside artists Jake Moore and Joey Holder she will be collaborating with staff and student volunteers in the DTH to create a virtual reality music video and live experience.
Read Aja's blog about her project
Amber Forrest, September 2016 - June 2017
Amber Forrest is an actress and director working in comedy, movement and art installations. As Nottingham Muse, alongside Theodore Zeldin, and with the help of DTH staff and student volunteers Amber opened 2017’s Being Human Festival with Conversation Dinner, an event at which diners were randomly paired with each other and chose from a menu of conversation topics. The resulting revelations – filmed, photographed and recorded by DTH volunteers – were used to create a Portrait of a City.
James E Smith, June 2014 - June 2015
James E Smith is a local artist working with lens-based media; his work has been exhibited at the Ropewalk Gallery, Surface Gallery, Broadway Cinema, and Surface Gallery among others. His latest work ‘Model’, created at the Digital Transformations Hub, exhibited as part of OPEM3 at The Collection in Lincoln.
Read what James has to say about the thoughts and processes that went into creating ‘Model’ on DTH’s Digital Dialogues blog.
'Model'
James E Smith was selected by Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey and Kenneth Armitage Foundation Fellow Jess Flood-Paddock along with seven other artists to exhibit in OPEM 3, the third biennial open exhibition at The Collection in Lincoln. Each selected artist received a bursary to produce a new work specifically for the exhibition.
Smith’s work ‘Model’ was produced during his first months of his residency at the DTH. The artist placed an advert on a jobs listings website looking for someone willing to pose nude and have their body scanned inch by inch with DHC’s handheld 3D scanner operated by Smith himself. The procedure was captured from multiple angles using video cameras and the footage was edited together to present a real time film of the entire scanning process.
The other element of the work is a sculpture manufactured by a machine that uses a laser to bond nylon powder, a process called additive manufacturing or more commonly, 3D printing. The object in this case originated from point cloud scan data we see Smith capturing in the video piece. The video shows Smith moving around the sitter, checking his captured data on a nearby computer. The scanning process captured millions of individual points on the sitter’s body and took over an hour and a half.
Smith presents this object in an alcove cut into a large wall joined to the main gallery wall. The wall juts out into the room and creates a walkway so that visitors can walk behind it where they are presented with the film piece. Depending on how the viewer orientates the space determines which part of the work they encounter first. Those walking around the gallery clockwise would no doubt glimpse the film and enter the space behind the wall before seeing the sculpture in the alcove. The encounter is reversed for those walking anti clockwise around the space.
OPEM 3, The Collection, Lincoln, 31st May-7th September 2014.
Theresa Caruana, September 2011 - September 2013
Multimedia artist Theresa Caruana curated Art in Your Park in November 2013, a public art exhibition in collaboration with WW Gallery, London and University of Nottingham. Working with DTH and Horizon’s Ben Bedwell, she utilised the Wander Anywhere app.
Read more about our Leonardo Fellows on our blog