UNITe 2018

30 June - 22 September 2018

Lydia Meehan, <i>You Don`t Have To Be An Artist</i>, 2018
Lydia Meehan, You Don`t Have To Be An Artist, 2018

Edita Atmaja, Clare Charles, James Cocks, Lauren Heckler, Helen Malia, Lydia Meehan, Dai Howell & Kate Mercer, Florence Moon, Hannah Morris, Dan Pritchard, Claire Prosser, Aled Simons, Laura Welsman and Ellie Young.


Devised by artists for artists, the UNITe season is a summer programme of artistic experimentation, research, critical discussions, film screenings, socials, lectures, and more.

Taking inspiration from independent art schools, studio groups and peer led activity, g39’s UNITe season transforms the exhibition venue into a busy artist studio complex and hub for creative research, training and collaboration. We invite the public in to witness the often-unseen studio activity of artistic practice and take part in discursive sessions.

Annually the UNITe studio community fosters and supports artists at any career stage. It is a space for artistic practice and its associated research, testing, wrong turns, collaborations, serendipity and discovery. This year fifteen artists were selected from an open call in Wales and the rest of Britain. We were also pleased to extend the offer to artists in Indonesia with support of British Council.

For the artists this is an intense period of supported work and they are asked to shape the peer directed programme, as well as benefit from it. In addition to feedback from the studio community and g39’s audiences we have invited a number of guest contributors to lead studio crits and debates, and discuss criticality. We’re particularly interested in how artists in a studio community can support one another in rigorous critical ways, and will be exploring a range of methods for critiquing artworks constructively in a studio setting to generate stronger, more rigorous approaches.

For the public, the space will be open as usual while events evolve and develop from the artists involved in the programme. They are also invited to attend a series of free public talks from several visiting speakers including Eddie Peake, Helen Nisbet, White Pube, Rory Macbeth and Matthew De Pulford as well as a live broadcast on Resonance FM of The Gleaning, the second in a series of events and artistic responses to James Richard’s Cymru yn Fenis ! Wales in Venice representation at the 2017 Venice Biennale. The Bad Vibes Club, an artistic research project by Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau working with Sophie Mallett, will look at the act of gleaning as an artistic practice – whether picking out snippets from hours of online videos, or concentrated research into specific archives.

By bringing together g39’s audiences and artists in this way we want to promote an understanding of where visual art comes from. Whatever the context and wherever the situation – the studio, the workshop, the library, the laptop, urban or rural – are all sites of production that are usually kept separate from the sites of presentation.

UNITe 2018 concludes with an open studio event, led by the artists to see what they have been doing and to celebrate well into the final hours of the residency.

  • Lydia Meehan, <i>You Don`t Have To Be An Artist</i>, 2018
  • Aled Simons (R), Hannah Morris (L), 2018
  • Laura Welsman, 2018
  • Clare Charles, 2018
  • Ellie Young, 2018
  • Dan Pritchard 2018
  • Claire Prosser, 2018
  • Kate Mercer & Dai Howell, 2018
  • Helen Malia, 2018

Programme