FCDI Artist Innovation Bursary awarded to Feral Practice
Feral Practice, Mangotsfield. Photograph by Charles Emerson
Ginkgo Projects is pleased to announce Feral Practice has been awarded the FCDI Artist Innovation Bursary.
Funded via the newly opened Firepool Centre for Digital Innovation (FCDI) in Taunton, this bursary will support Feral Practice in developing more innovative, sustainable, engaged ways of working over a 10-month period.
Wellington-based artist Fiona MacDonald works with humans and nonhumans as Feral Practice to expand imaginative and cultural connection across species boundaries. Often people set up a divide between human and nonhuman beings, and between different categories of knowledge and understanding. Feral Practice works and converses across these barriers.
With the support of the FCDI bursary, Feral Practice seeks to work with local community groups to address individual and societal issues by approaching them through a more-than-human lens.
“Wildlife and natural habitats are not only in need of our respect and protection, they are also holders of wisdom and worth for us all as humans, and they are our indispensable partners in building healthier, more equitable multispecies futures for Taunton and Somerset”
“Ginkgo Projects and Somerset Council are delighted to award this bursary to Feral Practice and excited to support their activity in Taunton over the next 10 months.”
About Feral Practice
Fiona MacDonald works with human and nonhuman beings as Feral Practice to expand relationality and cultural connection across species boundaries. Their interdisciplinary work draws on artistic, scientific and subjective knowledge practices. They use digital technologies together with mixed media, text and participation to investigate multispecies perspectives and foreground distinctive creaturely subjectivities.
Current projects: The Word for Home is Forest is a digital film responding to the ecology and geology of the Quantock Hills and to the Romantic poets who wrote there. It was co-created through a year of outdoor and digital educational activity with year 9 students from Pyrland School, Taunton and commissioned by Quantocks Landscape Partnership Scheme. It is on show at Hestercombe Gallery as part of What Stories Make Worlds from 20 July 2024 to 23 Feb 2025. WaterLANDS artist in residence for the UK with Laura Harrington 2023-6, exploring the beings, processes and materials of peatlands and their restoration in Northern England. Wirksworth Festival artist in residence 2023-4, working with recorded conversations, sculpture and painting to propose the wellbeing of human and nonhuman worlds as inextricably enmeshed.
Recent Projects: Residência Formigeiro, KinoBeat Festival, Porto Alegre, Brazil, sponsored by the British Council. CÖCÖCÖCÜ, CCMQ Porto Alegre. Stream of Consciousness, 360 VR experience about the Darent Valley commissioned by DVLPS. Sur les Bords du Monde: férales, fières et farouches, FRAC Alsace. A Rose is a Rose is a Rose, Hestercombe Gallery. Empathy for People, Empathy for Things, University of Hertfordshire Galleries. Listening Station, public sound artwork for Mangotsfield Folly. The Ant-ic Museum, Scarborough Art Gallery. Lissener, Estuary Festival. Sum Tyms Bytin Sum Tyms Bit, Folkestone Fringe. This Vibrant Turf, with Sonya Schönberger, Goethe Institut. Ask the Wild, with Marcus Coates: Scarborough Museums, BBC Somerset, Somerset Art Weeks, Whitechapel Gallery, Tate St Ives, Turner Contemporary, Whitstable Biennale. Mycorrhizal Meditation: Taipei Biennale, Fungifest Governors Island NYC, Bánkitó Fesztivál Hungary, Radical Mycology USA, Furtherfield Gallery, The Bluecoat, UNESCO Paris.
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About the Firepool Centre for Digital Innovation
The Firepool Centre for Digital Innovation is a 2,493 square metre innovation facility in the heart of Taunton. The £11 million Centre is designed to drive innovation-led growth in the digital economy. It will provide digital and data led businesses the space, environment and support needed to help them grow.
The Centre is owned and operated by Somerset Council as part of a £40 million network of not-for-profit innovation centres across the county. These innovation centres support innovation in Somerset’s key growth sectors, raising productivity and creating high-value jobs in the local economy.
The capital funding for the construction and fit out of FCDI – including the artist’s bursary – was secured from the European Union’s European Regional Development Fund (£1.69 million), HM Government’s Getting Building Funding (£5.45 million), Growth Deal funding (£235k), Business Rates Retention Pilot funding (£250k), and Council capital funding (£3.6 million).