Loire Valley Residency : Applications for General Assembly’s Spring 2027 Residency will open in late September

I am developing a body of work that sits at the intersection of time, the female body, and consciousness. I find myself increasingly aware of the body as both an archive and a vessel- carrying memory, desire, loss, potential and transformation simultaneously. My work explores the threshold between biological and cosmic time: how the body records experience that often precedes language, and how transformation can be understood not as decline, but as expansion.

The Loire residency felt uniquely aligned with this stage of my practice. Working with duration, bodily change, and cycles of transformation, I wanted dedicated time within a landscape shaped by water, geology, seasonality and deep histories of change. The river offers a powerful metaphor for what I'm exploring: the continual movement of time, the accumulation of memory and story, the coexistence of erosion and renewal. I wanted the landscape not as a backdrop but as an active collaborator in the work.

On arrival I went straight to the river to begin this immersion to my surroundings, I passed a sign to Chinon and was reminded that this is where Joan of Arc first met and convinced the Dauphin Charles to believe her. I was seduced.

I began thinking about what these feminine waters (Loire being feminine in French) have carried and buried, what stories are missing. This valley's history was shaped by remarkable women- Joan, Catherine de Medici, Anne Boleyn, Camille Claudel, Dorothea Tanning. Women shaped by, and sacrificed to, the histories around them.

I started to imagine what an alternative history/future might look like: one where power structures and gender roles could be more ambiguous, where women's stories were documented beyond domesticity. Herstory rising to the surface. A landscape carved by submission, yield, surrender- the slow wearing-down of power games and gender rules.

I was drawn to the historical graffiti scratched into the soft stone of the region- as record, but also as evidence that the wearing-down of something soft can leave something permanent. That idea has shaped how I've worked. I have cast my own body to make breastplates, working the latex into soft, flesh-like textures. I have made ceramic "weapons" from typically feminine objects: sewing needles, fruit, vegetables- alongside mono prints that I have painted over. Casting, sculpting, printing/scratching, painting: each a way of pressing something soft into something that lasts. I hope that by the end of the residency I will have visually built a world I could return to and embody. A future performance not yet realised, in which my own impermanent body meets these permanent works. A woman in time, recorded.

Read Keziah Stilwell's Full Residency Interview

I paint watched women at ease. My figures exist in seductive landscapes, both surrounded and surveying, their expressions lingering somewhere between exhibitionism and lethargy, aware of the artistic implications of painting women at rest, as historical and canonical eye candy. I am playing with this, placing women as directors in the scene, an omniscient part of the landscape. Large and in charge, occupying at leisure.

Before the residency I was between studios and had just moved to London to undertake the Drawing Year at the Royal Drawing School in September. My work had become increasingly focused on the seduction of nature and the figure in the landscape, but my trees had started to feel contrived, lacking the ragged reality I saw when I was out walking. I wanted to place myself physically in the landscape, to look properly and let it push my compositional instincts somewhere new. The Loire gave this in full. Immersed in the unbound space, working from the bountiful garden was a real pleasure. Finding shady spots where women might lay unbothered. My figures became more at ease, rebellious in their rest. I moved from drawings of seductive scenery scribbled in my sketchbook straight up to the attic studio and painted scenes of women content in their surroundings .

Absorbed by the richness of the French countryside, the ochres and deep greens seeped into the work, making my palette more saturated, more direct. Colour has always been a kind of seduction in my practice, drawing the viewer into something more sexually transgressive and sardonic than it first appears and here, surrounded by sprawling countryside that seduction feels more instinctive than ever.

The tension between desire and disquietude is central to my painting and informed by my experience as a gay man moving between the city and rural isolation. My recent work explores how images can hold multiple realities, viewpoints and emotional registers simultaneously. Figures, animals, objects and fragments of landscape are assembled to create unexpected and poetic juxtapositions.

At Le Moulin de Marnay, I am connecting recent still lifes with earlier paintings of figures on beds, rafts and diving boards. The tables and window ledges of the still lifes echo these platforms, and I have begun to think of them all as stages where bodies, birds, flowers, fruit and other objects can meet without the usual constraints of scale, history or logic. These invented spaces move between interior and landscape, observation and hallucination.

The first thing I did when I arrived at the residency was turn a cardboard box into a simple diorama. I have been arranging objects, plants, fruit and cut-out figures within it to test unlikely encounters and shifts in scale. I then photograph the arrangements and use them to make photo collages as the basis for mixed-media paintings.

A visit to the nearby Maison Max Ernst in Huismes, where Ernst and Dorothea Tanning lived and worked, inspired this approach. In Ernst’s collage room, we saw how he transformed found images into unsettling, dreamlike realities. Similarly, I want the Loire Valley’s gardens, interiors, birds, shifting light and rural stillness to enter my work as fragments, reassembled into something less stable and more psychologically charged.

Drawing on collage, observation, memory and invention, I use disruption rather than coherence as a compositional strategy. Changes in scale, fractured perspectives and unexpected pairings prevent the image from settling too quickly. The work begins with looking but develops through interference, repetition and accident.

Read James Dearlove's Full Residency Interview

I am a painter whose work emerges from an ongoing dialogue with nature, particularly trees - not as fixed forms, but as remembered presences. Based in London, my daily environment is shaped by density, movement, and constant stimulation. This residency offers a necessary shift: a space to decelerate, to observe, and to reorient my perception.

In Azay-le-Rideau, I am interested in inhabiting the landscape through duration - allowing time, light, and atmosphere to register slowly. My practice involves reconstructing imagined landscapes through fragments of memory and photographs I collect. These elements are not documented but reassembled, collaged into new spatial compositions that exist between reality and recollection.

This process is closely tied to a sense of inner stillness. Being here feels like entering a quieter state of awareness -listening to birdsong, watching clouds drift, and attuning to subtle shifts in light. These moments suggest a kind of spiritual awakening, where attention itself becomes a medium.

I am also interested in challenging my own tendencies toward accumulation and refinement. Rather than building layers toward resolution, I want to explore reduction - understand how absence, space, and restraint can carry equal weight. In this context, “less” is not a limitation, but a way of opening the work.

Through this residency, I hope to recalibrate both my perception and my practice- to allow the external landscape and internal memory to meet, overlap, and transform into something newly composed.

Read Seohyun Oh's Full Residency Interview

Being from New York, I think my work often displays some of the characteristics of the buzz of the city - high energy, and oftentimes crowded with figures. The space within the work is often fractured, with schematic diagrams interrupting organic form. When I was invited to participate in this residency I was excited to see what would occur in the painting when removed from this context and the rhythm of New York.

The Loire was particularly exciting for the history embedded in its landscape. From the Neolithic Caves to the studios inhabited by Da Vinci and Ernst, this valley has been a source of creation for thousands of years.

In the city, my practice involves an accumulation of reference material, which ultimately guides the composition of the work. While I am here, I am interested in releasing control and submitting more to the material itself, allowing the paint to dictate the form and subject matter.

Emphasizing this material dialogue I am interested in making work whose form is not dictated or prefigured, but emergent. The silence afforded by the landscape is the ideal backdrop for this call and response approach to painting.

Read Atticus Wakefield's Full Residency Interview 

Nature is not only a source of inspiration but also a physical part of my work. As I become increasingly aware of its presence and role within my practice, I have begun to rediscover and deepen my connection with plants in a more holistic way.

Being here, I am surrounded by a vivid range of refreshing greens. The landscape feels expansive and open. My eyes were forgetting to look far—in the city, the horizon is rarely visible.

In contrast to working in London, working here feels natural; it flows with ease. I wake up already immersed in nature, held within the fullness of spring—young leaves, shoots, buds, wild roses, and apple blossoms.

My recent series of plant casting work leans into the sense of wind: what it carries, how it moves, and the messages it holds. Many spring plants seem to embody the energies of wind and fire, carrying a sense of purity, warmth, and hope.

I feel deeply grateful to be able to work with nature in this way, and sharing this moment of stillness with the inspiring residents and General Assembly.

Read Seohyun Oh's Full Residency Interview