2017 Awardee: Christiana Bissett

"Because of the Dewar Arts Award I am privileged to be exploring my practice in a new and exciting masters, as well as engaging in an international dialogue about art and ecology."

Biography

Christiana is a Glaswegian artist, with a research practice in aesthetics and ecology. Using performance methodology her work explores how we perceive environment and how this perception impacts our imagined futures.

After making and touring award winning work with company Junction 25 from a young age, Christiana studied performance theory at the University of Glasgow. During this time she developed a clear interest in the urban environment, and created site based and politically engaged work programmed by the CCA as part of Unfix Festival of Ecology and Performance and at The Arches as part of Arches Live:Scratch.

With six other students in the department, Christiana founded The Doing Group, a collective response to the tradition of reading groups, experimenting with the potentialities of ‘doing’. Since their beginnings two years ago The Doing Group’s work has been shown in the Pollokshields Playhouse and CCA in Glasgow, as well as at Temporary in Helsinki. The group’s research has been supported by the Alistair Cameron Scholarship and presented in a Spaces of Exile Symposium in Tramway Glasgow.

https://cargocollective.com/christiana

How the Award Helped

Christiana’s Award supported her as one of six artists participating in a pilot MA in Ecology and Contemporary Performance at Helsinki’s University of the Arts. With an overarching question of ‘What is Performance Now?’, the students received mentoring from artists Kira O’Reilly and Tuija Kokkonen.

Christiana’s research explores how bodies and materials interact in the practice of water dowsing, and how neurodiverse subjects experience their surroundings.

"Because of the Dewar Arts Award I am privileged to be exploring my practice in a new and exciting masters, as well as engaging in an international dialogue about art and ecology."