2026 Studio Residency Programming
Last but certainly not least, we are pleased to announce our Studio Residency programming for 2026! We’re so excited to welcome these artists to our space this year, and can’t wait to see their projects come to life during their residencies! These artists will each spend several weeks at Eastern Edge, so check out what they have planned below, and keep an eye out for upcoming talks, workshops, and other events with our AiRs.
Sun Forest
February 6 – March 21, 2026
I Saw New Worlds Beneath the Water, New Skies and A New Day expands as sculpture, organism, and somatic gesture to recast the traditional Korean ssukaechima into speculative cloaking devices. Crafted from living biomaterials (i.e., mycelial lattices, algae cultures), matter that metabolizes, blooms, and decays, the sculptures practice a kind of camouflage: as shelter, as refusal, as a breathing strategy of survival. Activated through somatic performance, the work proposes that the body remembers resistance transgenerationally, through breath, gesture, withdrawal, and care, carrying forward the histories of those who remained ungovernable not through spectacle but through subtle evasion. In this framework, symbiosis between the changing composition of the biomaterial cloaks create more-than-human kinships that propose futures outside extractive relations. The documented performances activating the cloaking devices in public spaces attempt to resist hypervisibility not in order to conquer, but to heal, to rest, to remain multiple and irreducible.
Rae Swan
April 10 – May 23, 2026
Inspired by Susan Sontag’s On Photography, I am interested in challenging the practice of traditional landscape photography, where it exists separate from us, haunting and still. Indigi-futurism looks to honour ancestral knowledge to guide our way forward. As we see everything through our screens, we see the natural world in a colonial way: stagnant, far-removed from our daily lives, and commodified.
To reconnect to the Land we have to trust in its autonomy and approach a relationship with curious wisdom. I want to know How does the world change when we change the way we look at it? I’ll begin this project without a camera, exploring Newfoundland and local communities. Then, once familiar, research will converge with performance and videography. I will strap the camera to my body; it becomes an organ and I, a cyborg; making footage on how a human creature moves in relation to the land. Contrasting the picture perfect images we are used to, the videos place the conversation in-between and in the now.
Image credit: Griffin O’Toole
Jem Woolidge
June 12 – July 25, 2026
Jem Woolidge will spend his residency developing a collection of garments for musicians, inspired by the camp aesthetics of performance spectacles and stagewear, and in collaboration with local performers. Inspired by designers like Bob Mackie describing Elton John as a ‘Male Showgirl’, his costume methodology is inherently queer, colorful, silly, and imagery-based. He is interested in the ways in which garments can disarm both the wearer and the viewer, and create a more permissive environment to perform and be an audience in.
“I was fascinated by the social permissiveness of stage performance. You can ‘get away with’ wearing anything under the prerequisite of performance, including draggy, campy, tacky garments. In contexts where dressing in a gender nonconforming manner in a casual setting would potentially cause a stir, stage performance is an outlet where things can go unquestioned. Historically, costume designers would dress their subjects in high camp, effeminate garments, and from Liberace to Twisted Sister – their oftentimes conservative fan bases would watch and applaud.”