Designer in Residence
Our residency programme supports designers to develop new skills, take risks, undertake research and create exciting, new work influenced by our collection, building and themes.
The studio is a place for them to reflect and consider new ways of developing their practice. By sharing this process, the designer will give people a glimpse into how they work.
Our current Designer in Residence is Harun Morrison. Harun is an artist and writer whose work often employs collaborative processes. His practice spans spatial design, text, video and sound. His ongoing interest in the shifting potentials of civic space is informed by being a boater; which in turn prompts questions about land ownership in relation to itinerancy, and the degree to which living on water affects one’s relationship with the environment and state infrastructure (notably sewage, administrative systems and the National Grid).
He was the 20/21 recipient of the Wheatley Fine Art Fellowship, hosted by Birmingham School of Art, Birmingham City University and Eastside Projects; this concluded with his recent solo exhibition 'Experiments With Everyday Objects'. His forthcoming novel, The Escape Artist will be published by Book Works in 2023. Since 2006, Harun has co-steered the collective practice, They Are Here, with Helen Walker. He is also a trustee of the Black Cultural Archive (est. 1981)
Harun is currently repairing and re-designing a garden space for Mind Sheffield in partnership with Arts Catalyst, working on a community garden for Bootle Library in Merseyside with Rule of Threes and making a series of long term interventions in the courtyard of a psychiatric intensive care unit in Hammersmith.
Our second Designers in Residence were Assemble, a multi-disciplinary collective working across architecture, design and art. Over their six-month residency, they will work with us, Dundee's Central Library and a group of local people to explore the relationship between contemporary production techniques and traditional building crafts.
Our first Designer in Residence was Simon Meek, a mixed-media storyteller and founder of Glasgow-based games studio The Secret Experiment. His most recent work, a surreal noir video game called Beckett, also features in our Scottish Design Galleries.
Simon developed an experimental work of fiction called Fragments of a Fictional Place. Presented as a unique array of digital artefacts, performances and print, each element depicted an event from within an entirely made-up, yet knowingly-familiar, Scottish town.
With an emphasis on physicality and audience interaction, Simon wrote and designed short-form dramas as a collection of experimental interactive works.
This residency was supported by The National Theatre of Scotland’s Citizen of Nowhere project.
We look forward to seeing how Simon will develop this work further.
Follow #VADResidency on Twitter for more updates and to look back on our first Designer in Residence.
