Welcome to the Workshop Studios Artist-in-Residence Program – an invitation to immerse yourself in a supportive and inspiring environment for up to three months. This residency celebrates diversity, inclusion, and artistic merit, encouraging applications from artists of all backgrounds and experiences. No prior ceramic experience is necessary to apply. This residency is not designed for pottery production but rather to support individuals working in experimental and contemporary contexts.

Selected artists will receive support during their residency, enjoying a free private studio equipped with essential materials, including clay, underglazes, and reduction glazes, tools and various firing options. There will also be access to a large StoneFlower Clay 3D printer (volume, 50 x 50 x 50 cm3 = 125L 3D) for those with expertise in this cutting-edge field.

In return for the provided space, access to kilns, and materials, we request that artists contribute to our community and this can take the form of an artist talk or demonstration to share your artistic process. Alternatively, we ask for a piece of artwork to be donated to the studio, creating a lasting connection and legacy within our artistic space.

Applications are ongoing with no set deadlines, however only successful applicants will be contacted.

We are currently accepting applications for local and international artists, but at this time accommodations and travel are not provided.

Our Current Artist In Residence

Kasia Sosnowski

In Saturday morning cartoons, small actions create disproportionate reactions, impossible new outcomes, and absurd realities. A painted archway becomes a passageway for Road Runner, but then immediately re-solidifies into a wall for Wile E. Coyote. A hole painted on the ground can be peeled off and placed over a bear trap for someone to land on. Wile E. Coyote can be suspended in mid-air over a canyon until he looks down, upon which, he plummets to the ground.

 

I am interested in the undercurrent of absurdity that runs throughout cartoons. Ceramics, like humour, relies on a delicate balance of timing, tension, play, and release. My current area of interest is exploring how clay lends its fragile and malleable qualities to create absurd, delicate, comedic sculptures. The work created during my time as an artist in residence working at Workshop Studios would attempt to emulate this perpetual oscillation between play and precarity, slap-stick gimmicks and intimacy, visual tropes and personal anecdotes. This oscillation and constant negotiation aims to explore the dynamic relationship between viewer and ceramic object that fluctuates between attraction and repulsion, anxiety and desire.

 

Throughout my practice, I aim to cultivate dialogues where transformation, absurdity, and humour are strategies that reposition narratives around grief, mental health, and trauma. Saturday morning cartoons, visual gags, and colour are all things that can be quickly dismissed as frivolous or superficial, but I use them as tools to encourage people to look closer and spend time with each object. The content I explore is mirrored in the precarity and material flux of ceramic sculpture, fragile and vulnerable, yet crystalline.

Our Past Artists in Residence

Sha Li

Sha is a contemporary art curator dedicated to building interconnected ecosystems and making art accessible, existing beyond traditional, hierarchical exhibition frameworks. Her mission is to cultivate curation as a care-based practice that fosters communal healing, reimagining relationships between artists, institutions, and audiences through approaches grounded in belonging, reflection, and connection.

 

Raised in Mohkinsstsis/Calgary, she has developed her practice across Vancouver, Beijing, Shanghai, Paris, Copenhagen, and London, working with renowned institutions including Lisson Gallery, Sotheby’s, and Nottingham Contemporary, alongside independent projects and artist-run spaces. She has also lectured on digital curation at leading art schools such as the Royal College of Art, the Courtauld Institute of Art, and the China Academy of Art.

 

Now back in Mohkinsstsis/Calgary, Sha is deeply inspired by Workshop Studios, where a self-sustaining ecosystem run by artists for artists thrives. During her residency, she has embraced ceramics as a meditative, re-centering ritual, mirroring the process of shaping clay with Zen practices. Through reflection and presence, each gesture becomes a way to recenter, embody care, and cultivate space for healing. Here, she is also nurturing horizontal systems of care with her peers and practicing release, allowing emptiness and openness to emerge so that art can flow back into daily life.

Alexa Bunnell

Alexa Bunnell is an emerging artist, writer, curator and fermenter based in Mohkinstsís (Calgary, AB) on Treaty 7 Territory. Their artistic work takes into account considerations of fermentation, ecologies and mycology. At varying points throughout their practice, Alexa has been taken with soliphilia: a love and responsibility for land, ecosystem, and microbiome, rooted deeply in interdependence and unity – an adoration of the interrelated whole.

 

Their artistic work has recently been presented at the Calgary Allied Arts Foundation Residency, EMMEDIA Gallery and Production Society, Marion Nicoll Gallery, White Rabbit Festival, The Bows and The New Gallery. Their writing has appeared in ReIssue Magazine, LUMA Quarterly, CMagazine, Galleries West and Canadian Art. Alexa has received numerous scholarships and grants including from Calgary Arts Development and Canada Council of the Arts. In 2020, they were awarded runner up for the Canadian Art Writing Prize.

Minoru Ueda

Born in Tokyo, I have spent the last 25 years dividing my time between Calgary and Tokyo.  I still maintain an architect practise in Tokyo focused on sustainable architecture.  When I came to Calgary, I started taking sculpture and pottery classes at ACAD and more recently studied pottery at North Mount Pleasant and Fairview studies in Calgary.  In Japan I study at the Shinoda Yuzan Gama and do wood firing with Aya Nakajima, a traditional Shigaraki artist.   I fire work at various kilns in Tokyo, Nagano and Yamanashi Prefectures.

 

I have worked with Shinoda to develop Oribe and other traditional Japanese glazes for kilns I am using in Calgary.  In general, I want to continue to develop techniques based on Japanese ceramic traditions.

 

I studied the Japanese Tea Ceremony (Urasenke) for several years in Japan and am interested in creating unique vases, vessels  and ceramic tea utensils for the Japanese Tea Ceremony as well as small specialty plates and bowls for Kaiseki cuisine.