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Back to Basics program
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IHsuan Fang
Taiwan, Taipei
Graphic design, Art, Healing
www 
"Go with the flow."
Fang IHsuan is an artist who expresses herself through design, painting, and ceramics. She is also an energy healer. She connects with soul messages and channels them into abstract lines, symbols, and colors, using her artwork to convey energy and intention. She believes in energy and the soul, and she also works closely with tarot cards as a tool for insight and spiritual connection.
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Erica McKeen
Vancouver, Canada
Fiction writing
www
I am a writer of prose—mostly fiction—and the author of two novels, Tear and Cicada Summer. I've also written weird, twisty stories that have found homes in various literary journals and anthologies. I'm interested in surrealist horror, slippery narrative perspective, monstrous bodies, failure in all its forms, and ugliness.
In my artistic practice, I love doing deep research on relevant topics; most recently this has been octopuses, Canadian sewer systems, and the decomposition of human bodies (for one project) and forest fires, mountain goats, and the configuration of lunar soil (for another). Nature and animal life is becoming increasingly central to my work, and I try to spend as much as possible moving and being still in natural spaces.
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Dan Zell
UK / Germany
Fiction Writing
Dan Zell is a designer and writer based in London, currently enrolled in the Creative Writing MA at UEA.
Drawing on his background in anthropology and design, Dan's fiction that explores how identity is constructed, performed, and quietly unravelled – with a mix of warmth, humour, and poignancy.
In 'Resolutions', a group of single thirty-somethings at a themed New Year’s Eve party write down their resolutions and vow to revisit them in a year. What follows is a multi-perspective, bittersweet portrait of modern loneliness, quiet hope, and the fragile architecture of intimacy, as each guest tries to change their life before the next countdown begins.
In 'Fit for Purpose', a contemporary uniform designer stumbles into the past through his work and soon finds himself tangled in the histories we wear and the identities we’re measured against. The story navigates the boundary between self and society, agency and order, in worlds where uniform is both armour and constraint.
Alongside writing, Dan is the founder of The London Sock Exchange, a long-running, design-led business which makes and sells socks. Previously he lived in Berlin where he also founded Toucan, a table-tennis company focused on craft, sustainability and play.
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Victoria Crayhon
Providence RI, USA
Photography, Video, Artist books
www
Victoria Crayhon’s work has been exhibited, published, and collected both internationally and throughout the United States. Her work has been prominently featured in publications such as the British Journal of Photography, the Christian Science Monitor, Slate Magazine, Huffington Post, Fraction Magazine, Zero_Cento Editions, La Journal de la Photographie, Fade to Black, Art/Photo Magazine, and The Photo Review top ten of 2019 and 2014.
It is also included in museum, corporate and private collections, among them the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Harvard/Fogg Art Museums in Boston, and Citigroup in NYC. Her projects have been exhibited in solo and group shows in New York City, Boston MA, Baltimore MD, Chicago IL, Los Angeles CA, Houston TX, Louisville KY, Philadelphia PA, Pittsburgh PA, and Providence RI, amongst other locations. Internationally, Crayhon's work has appeared in exhibitions in Helsinki FI, Athens GR, Budapest HU, Landskrona SE, Braga PT, Rome IT and Vladivostok RF. Using photography, video and artist books, her work addresses issues of personal identity and desire existing within the shifting frameworks and ideologies of the structures created by human society, whether political, social, commercial, technological, or physical realms.
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Natasha Gilmore
New York, USA
Writing, Education
"I write and teach for a freer future!"
Natasha Gilmore is a writer and teacher from NYC. She has been published in Foreword, Publishers Weekly, Boise Weekly, and more. Before becoming a teacher she has worked as a bookseller and journalist. She writes fiction and nonfiction for adults and children and is currently developing fiction and curriculum around hopeful futures. |
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Jesse Buratt
Turin, Italy
Sculptural Ceramics
www
I’m a ceramic sculptor who works with wild materials and uses hand-building techniques.I have chosen to work with locally sourced wild clay to utilize materials available in my immediate environment, thereby eliminating the need for transportation via planes, boats, or vehicles. The clay used within my work is hand-harvested, in both built and natural environments. It is then processed, made workable, and tested (fired) numerous times to see how the material responds to different levels of heat and how it can be mixed with other materials. I fire my pieces at high temperatures from 1150-1250 C to push materials to their limits, allowing them to travel through a geological process of change and dehydration in just a few hours.
My vessels begin with clay as the first layer, and then either naturally (kept within the material, instead of being sieved out) or by addition, rocks, minerals, sands, ochres, and carvings are included to create a landscape. It is an indulgence into the unknown since I never know what the clays, minerals or rocks I am collecting will look like once cooked. This landscape is a way for me to immortalise a valley, a river, a day or a time in my life. My practice is completely rooted to place, memory and experience. The pieces are often left unglazed to show the essence of the earth, its cracks and valleys, indentations and craters.
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Dean Harada
Kāneʻohe, Hawaiʻi, USA
Music composition
www
I was born and raised on Oʻahu, in the ahupuaʻa of Kāneʻohe. One grandfather was a plantation carpenter, the other an entrepreneur. My father was a jazz trumpet player, my mother a teacher. My life's been a synthesis of their collective ʻike and naʻauao.
Composition and documentation of music are my primary interests, where I work to reconcile the contradictions I love: collaboration and solitude, narrative structure and non-linear thinking, technology and the human touch.
My practice centers on deep listening — a search for the rhythm of reciprocity inherent in aloha and mālama ʻāina. This means a profound love and care for the land and sea, and an honoring of the kami and akua embodied within them. A listening for our place in the world.
My compositions include both acoustic instruments and electronic manipulation, combining conservatory training in Boston with years of technical production in Los Angeles.
Returning to Hawaiʻi, the throughline of experience led to founding Lōʻihi Records, a vinyl label focused on the emergent and endemic music and voices of Hawaiʻi. Creating work and space with this community is my great kuleana.
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Zoë Ruiz
Los Angeles, USA
Writing
www
"Writer and Editor from Los Angeles"
Zoë Ruiz’s writing appears in publications including The Los Angeles Times, Joyland, The Rumpus, and The Believer and has been anthologized in California Prose Directory, Rooted, and Golden State Writing. She has received support from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Spring Creek Project in Oregon. She has an M.F.A. in Fiction from Oregon State University and a B.A. in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
She edited Pulitzer Prize-winner Viet Thanh Nguyen’s works including A Man of Two Faces (longlisted for the National Book Award) and Nothing Ever Dies (finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award). With Dave Eggers, Amanda Uhle, and Zainab Nasrati, she co-edited I, Witness, a Norton series featured in the New York Times Sunday Book Review. She served as managing editor of The Rumpus.
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Alvis Lee
Taiwan
Digital art, creative coding
www
"Alvis Lee is a new media artist & lectur in Asia University
Currently based in London & Taiwan
He focus in generative art, audio-visual performances, and new media installations. The aesthetic concept behind his creation is inspired by observing nature. He also passionate about texture study and 3D motion graphics with GLSL / p5js in the field of generative art.
His artwork has been nominated and collected in the Shanghai international new media art festiavl, Peckham Digital Art London , Uncommon gallery Seoul, The National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts (Weiwuying) Art Installation Project, and C-lab Taipei."> |
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Heidi Rada
Austria
Collage, Assembly, Photography
www
Surprises are an essential part of my process. I believe in second chances — often, a closer look reveals something unexpected, something meaningful hidden in what’s been overlooked.
What seems insignificant becomes the beginning. Scraps of paper, confetti with a hint of grumpiness, old sticker albums — each holds a story, quietly waiting to be discovered
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Catherine Rios
Pennsylvania, USA
Writing
www
I write short stories, screenplays, and essays, but my creative practice originates in the collaborative processes of glass and filmmaking, all driven by a lifelong fascination with the power of story.
I like to explore the ways in which our everyday experience generates both beauty and terror, and the tension between political power and personal meaning.
As an artist I want my work to connect people to their own story, to other humans, and to the natural world, in deep and felt ways. This is important to me personally, but it is also my belief that connection is the last shield against misinformation and propaganda, among other things.
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Susannah Collins
Australia
Textiles, Embroidery, Painting
www
"Reflections on memory, nature, and repair."
Susannah Collins is a multidisciplinary artist based on Wurundjeri Country, Victoria, Australia. Working across painting, embroidery, and soft sculpture, her practice explores the emotional resonance of the natural world through tactile processes. Drawing on techniques like freehand machine embroidery and slow stitching, she weaves narratives that reflect on nature as a kind of seamstress—binding, mending, and renewing what is fragile or fragmented.
She holds a Bachelor of Film and Television from the Victorian College of the Arts and completed a Master of Fine Art at RMIT University in 2024. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows around Australia and often reflects on memory, time, and the quiet power of materials and techniques traditionally considered domestic or decorative |
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Christine Morrow
Australia
Painting, Curating contemporary art and arts writing
"I love the 'make' part of 'making'"
I work with paint on canvas in such a way that I highlight the role and purpose of the cloth that is a stretcher painting’s foundation. Traditional stretched canvases ’suppress their memory of cloth’. I tease it out, bring it to the fore and exploit it to integrate textile more overtly into my painting. Making art is tremendously creatively fulfilling for me. Not only intellectually, but I also crave ‘making’ which I refer to as ‘busy-fingers’ work. I especially love storytelling in my art works. The subjects of my paintings are local stories, urban myths and narratives about the rhythms of ordinary domestic life.
Photo: Mick Richards
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| See the list of all the Arteles residents here |
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