Shape Shifting in the Ephemeral Landscape

This residency is an invitation. Not to produce something, but to step outside the habitual ways we live, create, and relate to one another.

Each edition unfolds within a changing landscape. The landscape is not a setting. It is a temporary environment, one that lets participants set down their familiar roles and try on new ways of being.

Nobody arrives knowing what will happen. Strangers enter a shared space, and over a short span of time become collaborators, witnesses, companions. Through shared experience, collective ritual, creative exchange, and immersion in what surrounds them, something forms that wasn't there before: a temporary community.

The point is not the finished artwork. The point is the shift. A conversation that moves something in you. An encounter that unsettles an assumption you didn't know you were carrying. A moment of real attention, the kind that reconnects you to yourself, to the people around you, to the place you're standing in.

We live inside a culture built for speed, for sameness, for consuming rather than making. This residency asks for the opposite: intentionality. Every part of it is considered, the pace of the day, the relationship to the land, to local tradition, to the histories already living in the place. The landscape is not a backdrop here. It is a collaborator. A teacher.

And it's also something more practical than that: a resource. Part of the work is learning to look at what is already present, what the land offers without being asked, and finding in it the material for a creative practice. Not importing what's missing, but noticing what's already here, a sound, a texture, a rhythm, a found object, and letting that become the starting point. Creativity, approached this way, is less about invention from nothing and more about attention to what's already given. The landscape provides. The task is to notice.

At the centre of all this is the idea of shapeshifting. Not fantasy. A recognition, plain and real, that identity is not fixed. We change, continuously, through what we encounter, what we pay attention to, who we meet. The fact that this gathering is brief is not a limitation. It's the point. People come together for a short while, form real connections, exchange something true, build a shared memory, and then disperse, carrying it forward into whatever they make next.

Play matters here too, and not as a break from the real work. Through games, shared exploration, and creative collaboration, participants meet each other outside the usual social scripts. What looks like play often opens the door to something more serious: a deeper reflection on how we create, how we relate, how we choose to live.

What this residency is really cultivating is a community of people curious about other ways to exist, to make, to connect. A place to slow down. To listen more carefully than usual. To find out what becomes possible when people gather with openness, intention, and real respect, for the place and for each other.

In the end, the outcome that matters most may not be a physical work at all. It may simply be a shift in perception. A returned sense of wonder. A closer bond to the people around you. A sharper awareness of how you're moving through the world, and a little more say in how you choose to move through it next.