Press Release Andover Library AIR Residency

Dr Laurence Dubé-Rushby - Date: 25.10.24 - We are all Stranger-Artists

Inspired by the Venice Contemporary Art Biennale theme 2024 ‘Foreigners Everywhere’, from which she freshly returned, Laurence Dubé-Rushby will be CAS’s resident artist at the Andover Library, 1 st and 2 nd November. Her intervention invites members of the public to encounter, face, and tame strangeness and the uncanny through art. Laurence Dubé-Rushby is a French artist, based in the UK since 1996. She has twenty-eight years of experience in developing and leading art projects in community settings. Following the completion of her doctorate in creative pedagogy and performance art with AUB (Arts University Bournemouth) and UAL (University Arts London) in June 2024, she is interested to develop work that links environmental ethics, heritage, education, printmaking, textile and performance.

We are all Stranger-Artists. We are defined by our cultures, places, and by the experiences we encounter during our journey through life. Artists often navigate at the margins of the world and of their own communities, working with the strange and the unfamiliar, pushing the boundaries and thereby navigating fluid frontiers. For this residency, Laurence will develop a mixed-media performance that invites families and children to not only encounter strangeness through art but also get involved in mask-making and printmaking activities that will celebrate strangeness.

To echo the Biennale’s theme, this intervention celebrates ‘the self-taught artist, the folk artist, the craft maker, and the artista popular’, frequently treated as a foreigner in his or her own land’ across history. In her interactive performance-installation, Laurence embraces the stranger-artist in all of us, letting our stories intertwine to tame the strangeness in ourselves and weave a new, yet familiar, collective tale.

Participants will be invited to interact with a film projection created by Laurence during her British Council Research Fellowship residency in Venice (2019), to encounter and inhabit the world presented through artists’ gazes, all connected through water, air, stones and earth.