New Gaelic Artist in Residence with Tobar an Dualchais & ATLAS Arts Appointed

Gaelic artist Susannah Bolton has been selected for the annual Tobar an Dualchais (TAD)/ATLAS Arts residency to explore and create work relating to the oral heritage recordings available on the TAD website. This is the fifth year that this exciting opportunity has been offered.

A resident of North Uist, Susannah is an artist and educator interested in layered experience, acts of support, textiles and language. She works sculpturally, using time-intensive making to enact geological scale processes by hand, and has exhibited hand knitted socks more than once. She is currently thinking about time as vibration, loops, knots and the suspended experience of stimming.

Susannah remarked: “I’m delighted to be taking up this residency opportunity with Tobar an Dualchais and ATLAS Arts for the coming months. There couldn’t be a better combination of attentive, insightful, and thoughtful people to be supported by in my journey into the intricacies of the archive. It’s special, as a multidisciplinary artist, to have an open-ended opportunity where synchronicity has a chance to shine, bringing connecting moments out from our past as inspiration for the future.”

Flòraidh Forrest, Director of TAD stated: “Every year it has been a joy to see how different Gaelic-speaking artists learn from and relate to the recordings on TAD. It is a great opportunity for them to spend time really listening to the recordings and it is always amazing to see the different ideas they develop and how transformational this residency can be for their work. With such a rich range of recordings related to the making of cloth, I’m sure that Susannah will have no problem finding resources on the site to inspire her.”

Commenting on the opportunity to work with Susannah, Heather Fulton of ATLAS Arts said: “We're absolutely thrilled that Susannah is joining us for this year's Tobar an Dualchais artist residency. Susannah's practice, through sculpture, textiles and words, gives attention to experiences and feelings that are often hard to define, in quiet and humorous ways; exploring domestic time in relation to geological time, the looping of yarn in an attempt to make the perfect socks, the pace and pauses in how we make, speak - or write -.

The annual residency is unique in that it provides dedicated time within these incredible collections for an artist to research, without a predetermined outcome expected at the end. It contributes to the growing and complex understandings of culture in the Gàidhealtachd, where the archival recordings are living and continue to enrich our lives. It's an absolute joy and a real privilege to get to spend time with the artist and the TAD team, and to learn alongside them. We're looking forward to seeing how their residency progresses in the coming months.”

Susannah will be completing the residency on a part-time basis over the coming months and will share her work via blogs during that time. You can also keep up to date with Susannah’s residency by following TAD on Facebook and Instagram.

The residency is supported by Creative Scotland’s Targeted Gaelic Arts Development fund.

Previous artists who have been awarded the residency are Iseabal Hendry (2023), Calum Ferguson (2022), Mairi Gillies (2021) and Catherine Weir (2020).