Traveller women will be part of new Uillinn Artist Residency

TRAVELLER women will be invited to help ‘create a place of imagination’ with Toma McCullim who has secured the Cork County Council and Uillinn Artist Residency.

There will, in fact, be two residencies taking place with the multi-disciplinary visual artist Sharon Dipity also having been selected to work on a project focusing on movement.

The residencies, during April and June, have been created to support artists seeking opportunities to research and develop their practice and to engage with Uillinn, local and diverse communities and the general public.

As part of the residency package, each artist will be allocated studio space for four weeks and a stipend of €2,500.

During her residency, Toma said she will continue her work with Traveller women and to enlist their help in creating a place of imagination.

‘It will,’ she said, ‘be a meeting place, an intersection, where together they will be a fermentation of ideas.’

Toma’s work is powered by a strong belief in social justice and environmental ecology.

She was the production designer on the award-winning film Float Like a Butterfly, but one of her latest collaborative efforts was the making of Wheel of Dreams – a film scripted, edited and produced by eight Traveller girls.

Sharon Dipity’s residency from May to June is being conducted in association with Age & Opportunity’s nationwide Bealtaine Festival.

As part of her The Line has Two Sides residency, Sharon will share her work with the public at several events.

‘My ambition for this residency is,’ she said, ‘to develop the drawn line through mark-making, movement, and word, using different parts of my body to draw and move with. I particularly want to look at creating movement with an older body with its various limitations and old injuries and to embrace and transcend these limitations to create my own fluid vocabulary of movement and gesture.’