Forms for Encounter and Exchange: Laughing Waters Artists’ Fieldschool Residency

Artist residencies typically offer artists time and space away from the responsibilities of everyday life to create new work. By working in a new context, routines may be challenged with artists finding new inspiration from alternate physical and social environments. Artists can be hosted in local heritage properties, university studios, art galleries or libraries, and now even in public spaces like housing estates or community centres. Publically funded programs can also provide institutional opportunities for audience development, community engagement, public education, or to contribute to forms of cultural exchange and achieve broader national goals (Aitken and Swee 2004) positioned as soft centrepieces for cultural diplomacy. Internationally, there are more than four hundred formal residency programs across 70 countries (ResArtis 2013), which take a number of forms ranging from short-term self-funded individual studio residencies with no requirement for public outcomes, to participation in collective artist retreats, micro-residencies in a person’s home, to multi-partner international institutional programs that employ teams of artists for extended periods.