Waterfall Arts is honored to host Nina Elder for a residency in July 2021, entitled The Fray. Learn more about the project below — and stay tuned for upcoming opportunities to engage with Nina around this work. This residency is coordinated in tandem with our featured summer exhibition: Photographing Belfast’s Waterfront: Then & Now.
The Fray
The Fray explores the balance between reliance and resilience, repair and rejuvenation. During this residency, artist and researcher Nina Elder will engage coastal communities in one-on-one conversations, focusing on cycles of breaking and mending, trusting and healing.
In a studio at Waterfall Arts throughout the month of July, Nina plans to produce works of prose and poetry alongside a series of drawings that depict knotted ropes, mended anchor lines, and fraying nets. Nina’s art revels in the complexities of dependency and brokenness, and serves as a metaphor of living through climate devastation and social upheaval. It questions what tethers humanity during periods of extreme change, and how we might exist with what remains.
About Nina Elder
Artist and researcher Nina Elder creates projects that reveal humanity’s dependence on and interruption of the natural world. With a focus on changing cultures and ecologies, Nina advocates for collaboration, fostering relationships between institutions, artists, scientists and diverse communities. Her work takes many forms, including drawings, performative lectures, pedagogy and critical writing, long term community-based projects, and public art.
This residency is partly funded by a Discovery Grant from the Onion Foundation.
