We are delighted to announce the winners of this programme for 2024-25: many congratulations to Catrin Huber (Newcastle) and Eloise Fornieles (BSR) who will carry out work in Rome and Newcastle over the coming months.
Catrin Huber is an artist and Professor in Fine Art at the University of Newcastle. She often develops work in dialogue with specific places, exploring their contexts and histories, and their architectural features and idiosyncrasies. While working across a range of media, Huber is interested in how paintings can define or subvert places, how they set-up relations between actual and fictional spaces, while conjuring unexpected relations between materiality and representation. Colour, materials, and emotions loom large and bring sensory and psychological intensity. For Screaming / Dreaming she, for example, re-imagined the Antikensammlung in the Kunsthalle zu Kiel as a space to weave together new and old stories, colliding contemporary artworks, ancient statues, women from Greek tragedy, and the architecture of the Antikensammlung. For Expanded Interiors she brought contemporary, site-responsive installations to two Roman houses in Herculaneum and Pompeii.
During her time at the British School at Rome, Huber will explore – through creative practice – the complex use of shadows within Roman wall paintings and mosaics, their interactions with architecture, and their relation to contemporary practice.
Eloise Fornieles is an artist and British Academy postdoctoral fellow. Fornieles’ practice-led PhD from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, investigated the role of the voice in the generation of queer space and alternative gender narratives. Her current practice-led, fine art research project explores the intersection of historical expressions of political protest in Rome, including the satirical poetry of Catullus, the Talking Statues and the pioneering feminist collective Rivolta Femminile. These apparently diverse historical practices and traditions are linked by the opportunities they provide marginalized subjects to speak to—and against— the extant structures of power. During her time at Newcastle University, Eloise will research the graffiti inscribed on Hadrian’s wall, using inscriptions to contextualise other historic walls and contemporary art practices in which walls feature as sites of self-expression, political tension and protest.
