Dr Becky Shaw named artist-in-residence at Sarah Wigglesworth Architects

SHU Reader in Fine Art Dr Becky Shaw has been named artist-in-residence at Sarah Wigglesworth Architects, a design-led architecture firm active in the education, housing, cultural, civic & urban design sectors with sustainable design at the heart of their work.

Becky was chosen from more than 150 applications for the residency, which is part of a series of the SWA25 events series marking 25 years since the practice was founded. To celebrate SWA are also hosting a series of curated events taking place across the year.

Becky’s works ‘critically explore the relationship between the individual and the social’ and attempt to capture the scale and complexity of social and material relationships.

Recent works by Shaw include How Deep is Your Love?, a commission for the City of Calgary exploring Calgarian’s emotional attachment to their water infrastructure.

Shaw said: ‘I am delighted to be given the opportunity to be artist-in-residence at SWA and am keen to explore how the practice and the people within it work to produce types of social, emotional, and physical warmth and comfort, whilst negotiating complex social, material and political terrains.’

Wigglesworth, who received an MBE in 2004, commented: ‘We were immediately impressed with Becky’s poetic approach to what is traditionally considered as the purely practical.

‘For example, we loved her recent work exploring the emotional attachment of the citizens of Calgary to their water infrastructure, which included a child-size version of an industrial leak location tool. We are excited to be hosting Becky in our office over the coming three months and fascinated to see the results.’

Becky has been documenting her residency and you can read about this on her website here.

The news has also been picked up by the Architects’ Journal, which featured the announcement in an article published on Monday 25 March 2019. Read the full article here.

Dr Becky Shaw is Post Graduate Research Tutor in Art and Design, and researcher at the Art and Design Research Centre at SHU. Find out more about Becky’s work here.