Discover Our Artist Residencies
Delve into featured residencies, highlighting artists’ journeys, creative visions, and impactful works on displacement and resettlement.
Olena Hrabchak
https://www.cheshiredance.org/artist/olena-hrabchak/
Olena Hrabchak is a dancer and a refugee from Ukraine. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Choreography and specialises in Contemporary, Modern, Jazz, Classical, Commercial, she specialises in Ukrainian Folk Dance. Olena is both a performer and teacher, and is passionate about sharing her culture and story through dance.
Olena has presented a solo project at Xpressia Festival during the Eurovision week and has taken part in the “European Festival’ in Liverpool with her Ukrainian dance group. She is currently working as a co-creator of Folk Ukrainian Dance in Liverpool.
Olena is passionate about exploring different styles and looking at how she can improve people’s well-being through dance and loves working with all ages and abilities to tell their stories through dance.
Tayo Aluko
https://www.tayoalukoandfriends.com/
Nigerian-born Tayo Aluko is an acclaimed and internationally experienced actor, singer and playwright, based in Liverpool, UK, where he worked previously as an architect. His multi-award-winning play, ‘Call Mr Robeson’ has been performed as far North as within the Arctic Circle and as far South as New Zealand, A radio play about Robeson, ‘Paul Robeson’s Love Song’, was premiered on Robeson’s birthday, April 9, 2021, and is now streaming online. His art is dedicated to encouraging and inspiring progressive activism by showing how Black History is everybody’s history.
Marzieh Sahel
https://
Marzeih graduated from the University of Tehran in 1989 with a degree in Painting. Since then, art has been central to her life. Marzieh has worked as a university and high school art teacher while pursuing her journey as a freelance artist. Marzieh’s practice has evolved through various media, including painting, drawing, as well as both analogue and digital photography. She eventually developed a passion for fashion photography and jewellery design, which Marzieh still creates.
Marzieh has widely exhibited her work, won awards, and judged art and photography shows. Above all, she is passionate about sharing knowledge and creating emotionally resonant art.
Kirushan Sivagnanam
https://www.instagram.com/kirushan_sivagnanam/
Kirushan Sivagnanam is a visual and performance artist, originally from
Batticaloa, Sri Lanka with a degree in Fine Art from University of Jaffna. His practice explores identity, displacement, and transformation, grounded in his lived experience of migration. Kirushan’s work has a political and ethical grounding, being deeply concerned with economic inequality, colonialism and oppressive systems and how his work can articulate and explore this in the context of power imbalance, displacement and migration. Since relocating to the UK, Kirushan’s work has grown into a deep and ongoing dialogue between body, place, and history, with the body central to this, “Performance is how I process, express, and connect. My artistic choices are not only creative, they are a form of listening: to the land, to people, to emotional tone…I am especially drawn to working in public space. I believe the street, the park, the corner of a square, these are the places where real encounters happen. Art should not be locked inside institutions. I want to create work that meets people where they already are. Work that doesn’t wait for permission. Work that enters daily life”.
Claire Weetman
https://www.cheshiredance.org/artist/olena-hrabchak/
Claire Weetman is an artist who makes drawings, prints, installations and public interventions that visualise how we navigate through spaces, connect with others and observe the traces of things that are difficult to see. Since 2005 Claire has developed projects where she lives in St Helens, including co-founding Platform Studios in 2012 that has led to her supporting and advocating for other artists practices in programmes such as Reside*; developing projects since 2016 with people from global communities; and working with local organisations to create works that add a new layer of space where people can connect with each other.
Jon Raisin
https://jonathanraisin.org/
Jonathan Raisin studied music at Dartington College of Arts in the 1980’s and over the course of a wide and wildly varied career as composer, musician, theatre practitioner, writer, community artist, educator, promoter and project coordinator.
A collaboration with artist Elizabeth Willow for example, as Raisin & Willow, included Sea Breeze (2013/14) a project exploring the semi-derelict Winter gardens in Morecambe, and selected by Guardian critic Alfred Hickling as his no. 1 show of the year.Over the years, Jonathan has devised a number of projects concerned with communities and place. The Rightful Owners of the Song (Liverpool Capital of Culture 2008 artists commission), a year long engagement with a traditional singing community rooted in dockland pubs culminated in a performance with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and was twas featured on the BBC2 Culture Show. From 2007- 2014, he was co-curator of the acclaimed Liverpool live music event, Lost Voices.
