OPEN CALL: Artist parents/artist carers residency opportunity

PS2 is delighted to announce the call for our Artist parents/artist carers residency opportunity, supported by funds from Belfast City Council. 

About this opportunity: 

PS² is delighted to announce the call for an artist parents/artist carers residency opportunity, supported by funds from Belfast City Council. 

PS² will host an artist parents/carers residency in our Project Space in July 2023, at the beginning of the school holidays. Although school-age children are not a prerequisite to applying, we wanted to identify a period that can often be particularly disruptive for an artist parent/artist carer’s practice. 

The residency is designed to be open and responsive to individual artist parents/ artist carer’s needs. Therefore, in the application form, we invite you to tell us about how we might best support you, how you might use the space and time afforded by this residency and how it will support your practice. You can refer to a floor plan for the Project Space, if you wish, here. Alongside the fee, we have included some additional budget should you wish (and have capacity) to host an engagement event of your choosing which is inclusive of other artist parents/artist carers. 

Please refer to the PS² Accessibility and Inclusion Guide for details on the spaces, noting in particular any restrictions that may impact your personal circumstances. PS² is deeply aware of the need for more accessible artist-led spaces, many of which are impacted by temporary leases which do not allow these organisations to make the necessary changes to their buildings. Ensuring access for all is a key component of our future direction, to support meaningful, equitable, engaged, and reflective programmes of work with/for artists and for/with audiences. 

Application Procedure:

To apply, please send the following to Jane jane@pssquared.org by 6pm on Sunday 4 June 2023. 

• An application form, which you can find here as a Word document and as a PDF. 
  
• Your CV
  
• An Equal Opportunities Monitoring Form
  

Applicants with specific access needs can submit their application in an alternative format and are offered in-person support. Please email jane@pssquared.org if you would like to receive this information in a different format, e.g. paper format, large print version. 

PS² is committed to equal opportunities in recruitment and employment. PS² acknowledges intersections with additional barriers - which may include lower socio-economic backgrounds, d/Deaf applicants and/or neurodiverse applicants, applicants from Black, Asian, Traveller, Asylum Seeker, Refugee, mixed and other culturally/ethnically diverse backgrounds, applicants with disabilities or long-term health difficulties, applicants with LGBTQIA+ identities, applicants with no formal education and of older age - and encourages applicants for the Artist Parents/Carers residency to indicate where PS² can provide additional support or resources to mediate these additional barriers. 

This opportunity is funded by Belfast City Council’s Arts & Heritage Small Grants scheme.

Online information session, Thursday 25 May, 1pm

Got questions about our curator(s)-in-residence opportunity, or the artist parent/artist carer residency? 

We’re hosting a Zoom session on Thursday 25 May at 1pm where we will do our best to answer them! We’ll also record the session for those of you who can’t make it. Please email jane@pssquared.org to receive the Zoom link. Feel free to send any questions in advance!

1pm - 1.30pm: we’ll take your questions on the artist parent/artist carer residency 

1.30pm - 2pm: we’ll take questions on the curator(s)-in-residence opportunity  

Please let us know as soon as possible if you have any access requirements or translation requirements for this session. 

Click here to access the Zoom recording. 

Additional information

About us

PS² started in 1993 as a self-organised artist- and studio collective in Belfast, with currently 9 studio artists and 3 year-long residency programmes for: a curator, critical writing and a collective. In 2004, a small ground floor shop in the studio building was used as a project space for invited artists. The project space quickly became an attractive and important platform for local and trans-local artists to experiment and create new and site specific work, open to the public. Funded by the Arts Council and other sources, PS² soon established an annual arts programme of around 20-25 projects with mainly emerging artists and cultural producers.
Chosen from proposals, invitations, recommendations, open calls and chance encounters, PS² works on average with 40-70 artists a year, in the project space and with longer term projects at outside locations in community contexts.
PS² has a clear curatorial vision and curiosity, working with artists whose work is experimental, original, risk-taking, of social relevance- and- artistically brilliant.
PS² is a vital springboard for the development of artists’ careers within the arts ecosystem of Northern Ireland (see Freelands Artists programme) and a feeder to larger organisations. PS² projects assist many artists being rewarded with individual funding, residencies, travel awards and /or employment in the arts sector. With innovative project formats of open calls, we specifically target artists and cultural producers, who might otherwise remain undetected and unsupported.