Home - Back Lane West

We are a non-profit, artist-led residency, project, and meeting space in Redruth, Cornwall.

Whilst we remain closed to the public, we are pleased to announce that artists are now using the project space on an individual basis again.

We are very grateful to be in receipt of public funding from the National Lottery through Arts Council England’s Emergency Response Fund.

Phyllida Bluemel

Back Lane west are delighted to welcome Phyllida Bleumel for two weeks, offering Phyllida time to think about Time, which (have you noticed?) has been acting strangely of late. She will be be working on an illustrated narrative-in-progress, researching subjective, digital & deep time; appropriating medieval books of hours; and experimenting with the printed book as a place to slow down (or speed up) time as we experience it.

Rae Chapman

Rae Chapman is an artist with a background in social policy, community work and action research, who uses her practice to explore alternative constructs of reality. Rae has a long term relationship with Cornwall creating many of her works here and we are delighted to be hosting her for a residency timed to coincide with the G7 meeting of global leaders, which is scheduled to take place in Carbis Bay, Cornwall on the 11th-13th June 2021. In her Words “I’m returning now because, in the midst of a global crisis and an extraordinary planetary alignment, world leaders are flying into Cornwall to ‘build back better’. It is a momentous moment to be in Kernow – in Redruth – in Back Lane West – at the very epicentre of an epic shift.”

Where the centre is can be subjective – like reality. In 2009 Rae became an Artist Inquirer for the European Region of Culture mission, one of nine artists selected to undertake artist residencies in Finland, Poland and the UK in order to make the case for Cornwall as a non-urban centre of culture. Rae was based in Toruń, Poland, the birthplace of the astronomer Copernicus, who through his work capsized the certainty of where the centre of the universe might be.

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Katie Watts

As Back Lane West reopens to resident artists for the first time following the most recent lockdown, we are delighted to be welcoming St Austell based artist Katie Watts to make use of the space during the final weeks of her degree at Plymouth College of Art.

Recently Katie has been experimenting with photography to capture personal moments of silence and explore feelings of melancholy in a diaristic manner, and during her residency she will be working on ‘lone’, an ongoing body of work exploring the loss of touch. Absence quietly dominates this visual series, in which still frames balance a reality of distance with a desire for connection.

Katie says “I have experienced first hand the effects of a loss of physical connection due to the current pandemic, and have used my art practice as a distraction from my overpowering thoughts; it has acted as a form of therapy in some ways. Working tactically with analogue and instant film enables a raw and private narrative to be conveyed and hopefully supply comfort to others. We have all, in some way, adapted to this solitary life, but that does not mean it has been easy. I wished to document my individual struggle visually, not only to trick myself that I am coping but to inform people that they are not alone.”