An excerpt from a longer piece of writing reflecting on the residency..

The third time we were residents at Mawddach it was just for a week. The third time it was summer and the other houses in the row were heavy with holiday makers and it was hot and every time we went to swim someone thought it looked a good idea and joined us. The third time it got light too early to let it wake me. Still, we woke and we sat in the window and watched the sky and the water shift, and we ate Welsh cakes for breakfast.

We visited the old school that will become an art centre, went down into a once hidden basement, marvelled at the colours of layered paint on the walls and felt the buzz of potential, wondered at huge windows and side by side toilets and how a project could be consuming if you didn’t know just how worth it it would be when complete.

We swam twice a day and we sat for portrait drawing again and we finally got to grips with a story that had felt incomplete since that first visit, all that time ago. I moved the story from the house to the banks to a forest of seaweed. I rewrote it and I read it out loud and Cat noted down images and we chose six key points. She mocked them up in sketches and I cut the story down into six segments to go on six pages. We formatted the two stories we already have, so that soon we can make them into zines and share them.

Cat sketched and mono-printed and I finished a strange selkie novella and my hair was salty the whole time, and then the fog came, just like it had that first November. The water was empty, then, and we went in alone. The hills on the other side, the hills on the side where the new school, new residency, new start will be, were lost to low cloud and there was a pull to the water, but it wasn’t cold. We watched the sky pinken and the sun set. We watched the eclipse on a small rocky promontory and then saw meteors shoot over head, and we stared out of that window, we stared and stared and stared.

Mawddach has been a deeply creative, inspiring place for us. The world needs more spaces like this, where it is understood that art matters - that not only is it not frivolous to make, but that it would be frivolous not to make it.

..read more on Bonnie's substack.

Bonnie Radcliffe
substack

Upon arrival at the residency, I was captured immediately by the view of the Estuary. I had made a conscious decision not to look at too many images of the location so that I would not have any visuals in my mind.  I was certainly not disappointed by the stunning setting.
 
Our first days were spent exploring this new environment with stunning summer weather as a bonus.  We took walks along the Estuary, into Barmouth, crossing that incredible bridge, visiting the oak trees, Fairbourne beach & collecting objects along the way.
 
The gathered ‘finds’ were at first more natural items; ferns, stones, feathers & pine cones etc which were later replaced by an incredible amount of beach plastic at Fairbourne.  Time was spent cleaning & sorting all this debris then mark making to create a bank of source materials.  These later became incorporated into collage pieces which was a new development in my practice. I intend to continue using this medium further in the near future.
 
Living with all the plastic ‘treasure’ (of which I also have a vast collection in my own studio) gave the desire to find a creative solution for these materials within my work.  Experimental stitching, combining fishing net fragments, exploring colour combinations started a new concept for me… to utilise this discarded material. I aim to elevate this resource & incorporate it within my metalwork.  I am very excited to explore the possibilities.  This has directly evolved from the time at the residency.
 
New mark making, printing & collage techniques were explored as 2 weeks allowed time to experiment.  The benefit of a fellow creative & such an inspiring landscape enriched the experience.
 
I came away from Mawddach with a full journal, various piles of created papers, colour swatches, collages & bags of curated beach detritus with a plan to further develop these new avenues within my practice.  I enjoyed the early morning views over the Estuary, the constantly changing patterns in the sand, watching the birds & having the time & space to breathe.  Scarlett & Jake are the most welcoming hosts & have created a charming living space, with many books & artworks curated in a stylish & eclectic way.  Of course, there must be a special mention of Toby the beautiful resident cat who really made our 2 weeks purrrrfect!

Sharon McSwiney
website
instagram

This residency was beyond my expectations. I came with a goal in mind, wanting to discover the landscapes to find inspiration and hopefully, create a body of work with watercolour.
 
This year has been tough for my creativity, and leant me to question my love for watercolour. Painting began to feel more like working than anything else. The joy had started to fade gradually, coming to a point that I painted only with a goal in mind, for a book or a workshop, but never for the joy of it. I had lost the spark.
 
I came to the residency prepared to paint but I also took with me a lot of mixed media tools, just in case I didn’t feel like it. I researched hikes, downloaded an offline map, and carried in my suitcase more things than I should have. I made a plan : spending one day hiking, immersing myself in the landscape, and one day painting what I saw the previous day. I wanted to keep the connection with the landscape at all times, to create using what I saw, not with what I already knew to paint.

I felt immensely grateful the day I arrived and discovered the landscape : how to not fall in love with the estuary, the trees, the hills and the sheep ? I don’t know a place that looks more like a fairytale than this one. I felt the urge to walk, see everything, capture every plant and atmosphere, and more importantly, I found the joy to paint again. Everyday, I looked through the window at the estuary and went wandering outside. I printed some photos of elements that inspired me, stuck them on the studio wall with some notes about what they evoked for me. A beautiful foxglove turned into a nest for a mouse, the ferns became a hiding place for a badger and the fireweed a bed for a fox.

I walked 140km in two weeks, followed every path that I could see and learnt to know the place. I started to feel like I belonged there, that my creativity belonged there and that I could stay forever. The love for watercolour and the desire to paint all day came back and I left carrying with me a renewed happiness, a lightness that I hadn’t felt in months. I now feel like myself again, creative, strong and more important, happy. These two weeks focused only on creativity were exactly what I needed : no routine, no everyday mundane life, no work. Just curiosity, creativity and happiness.

Sarah Van Der Linden
website
instagram

body of water - seaweeds, a cat concierge, and cold April waters.

Mawddach. I do not know where to begin to speak of the most enchanting, intense, and peaceful two weeks we have ever experienced working creatively. This was our first residency, and we had high expectations of ourselves: to film all footage for our poetry film “body of water”.

body of water explores the body as an ecosystem, both vulnerable and robust. We began some very intuitive and raw initial filming during a weekend in Barmouth last year, and were captivated by the calm beaches and the complex tidal rhythms of the Mawddach Estuary. The idea for this project was born upon Barmouth bridge, looking down into the slowly revealed world of moonjellyfish and sealettuce. So we could not have been more thrilled to have been accepted for the residency!

Maybe you are asking yourself, what is a poetry film?
For us it is an exploration of what happens when poetry moves beyond the page and into images, sound, voice and performance. For us, poetry film is a chimerical being: part cinema, part ritual to honour our environment, part direct action against patriarchy and extractive capitalism. It is a moment where poems swim out to sea and become an incantation and take you into a realm where everything is possible.

The residency offered us such a unique opportunity: to dive deep into this ancient landscape, to get to know every lichen patch on a first-name basis, to become one with the water, to hear a goldfinch song for the first time, to be swallowed, swamped with all the colours of sea-mist. Being so close to the water deeply called to something within us. It took us out of our compulsive productivity and reacquainted us with a rhythm that has become strange to us: tidal. To live in synchronicity with the moon and the sea.

Waking up at dawn to catch the soft pink cloudlight, simply going for a swim midday because the currents are at their calmest, and the forests of bladderwrack are most cooperative for filming. It felt as if the environment was our collaborator, part of our artistic team. The gorse an unpaid actor, the wind the director, and Moritz and I are desperately trying to capture just a fraction of all this incredible, feral beauty. The waves swept more and more stories of selkies, sea spirits, and shape-shifting beings into our dreams. Everything was unfolding, opening up within us, and the story we were trying to tell for so long could finally arrive. We were learning the language of our story, how to speak of and with a body constantly flowing, changing.

It certainly helped that Toby, the resident purring concierge, was always there to warm our feet after long days of filming, while Jake and Scarlett kept us wonderfully fed with the most delicious (and pretty) pumpkin and rhubarb. We left feeling so inspired by the care and imagination of their work, and so grateful for the generosity, warmth, and fabulousness with which they held the space around us.

By the end of the two weeks, we had finished filming body of water, which would never have been possible without the residency. But more than that, we had been given the rare and beautiful chance to live inside the work: to follow the weather, the tides, the seaweed, the strange little sparks at the edge of the water. We had time to try things, permission to fail, to laugh, to be soaked through, to let the film reveal itself rather than force it into being. We left with wet sandy shoes, full hearts, and a hard drive full of seaweed, seamoss. body of water has not been made in Mawddach, but with it.

C.Moss Collective
website / instagram

Kate MacAlister
instagram

Moritz V:3rës
instagram

Graduate Residency Award Winner 2025
Mawddach Residency was my first ever residency. I arrived very excited for time and space to explore a new landscape and to reconnect with drawing and painting after devoting my final year [of BA] to ceramics. I wanted to allow myself the freedom to really get lost within the experience.

I did find myself getting lost—quite literally. In the first week, on my walks outside the studio, I would set off in one direction, second-guess myself, turn around, and end up a ways off from where I had planned. It was all new and exciting with so much to find and see, so I was always glad to be wherever I was.

Though when this sense of disorientation carried into the studio, it felt different. I began working with familiar patterns and movements in my return to drawing and painting, but they no longer felt right for me. It took a couple of days to realize that was where I really needed to find a new path and approach things differently.

I was drawn to the twisted, gnarled oaks surrounding the residency. I started by studying their trunks and roots, which slowly, in my mind, shifted into figures and hands. The trees felt like embodiments of endurance and adaptation, ideas that have become the core of my work. After being diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis the winter before graduating, I have been thinking about how to sustain my practice over time. The trees felt like a true reflection of that, adapting to their conditions and growing in unexpected ways.

It was also such a pleasure to share the studio with my fellow resident, Freyja Needle. I was inspired by her perspective on the environment, what she collected from it, and how she translated it into her work. Watching her use of ink encouraged me to open a bottle of sumi ink I had brought with me, but never used before. On my final day, I made a series of quick studies of the twisted trees, working with a brush and allowing the uncertainty and immediacy of this new medium to capture the gesture and energy of the oaks. This process was, by far, the one I found most exciting.

I am grateful to Jake and Scarlett for awarding me the opportunity to attend, and I feel very fortunate to have experienced such a visually rich and supportive environment. In the transition from graduate student to artist, my time at Mawddach felt like a cocoon stage within the development of my practice. By the end of the two weeks, I had developed a deeper sense of both the place and my process, and I had managed to find my way back into something by taking the unfamiliar way.

Alex Morante
website
instagram

Graduate Residency Award Winner 2025
I was so excited when I found out I was selected for the Graduate Residency Award, it felt like the light at the end of the postgrad tunnel to have the opportunity to spend two uninterrupted weeks in such a beautiful area of Wales I used to visit as a child.
Trying to balance my practice with a full time job was proving difficult but having Mawddach as my first residency allowed me to get back in the flow of making; no distractions just fully immersed in nature. Just what I needed.

Upon arrival at Morfa Mawddach station with a cargo bike packed full of materials I ‘might’ need, Alex Morante (my co-resident who was coincidentally on the same train) and I were greeted by the wonderful Jake and Scarlett. Feeling immediate comfort as they welcomed usinto their home. And so it began. I didn’t have much of a plan, just to explore and see where the landscape took me.

Waking up to the view of the estuary the next morning made me motivated for the day ahead. I hadn’t planned where the day might take me, as I was slightly overwhelmed by the options after spending the evening scanning maps and brochures of the area. So, I decided to just get lost…resulting in a lot of pushing my bike up steep hills and tiny footpaths. I knew it had been a successful day when I returned with almost an entire seagull skeleton and lots of driftwood. Getting lost isn’t so bad.

Wading through mud, internally reciting ‘were going on a bear hunt…’ Stumble, tripping across a family of abandoned sheep carcases. Watching the birds’ dynamics from the kitchen window with a coffee. Boiled eggs by Arthog waterfalls. On the move monoprints. Freezing cold swims. Undulating forms of the estuary. Solo pints with my sketchbook. An abundance of bones. Semi dangerous rock clambering, trying to shortcut footpaths to avoid turning back on myself. Conversations about death and God? Scarlett’s rib cage shaped pasta. Eerie chunky sheep and emo horses. My first experience cycling on seaweed. The curious sternum bone. Albums which will forever be associated with Mawaddah. Mine and Alex’s combined pile of fairytale books on the studio windowsill. Watching the changing weather and tides. Crying over sheep multiple times. No pressure, endless drawing, collecting and creating.

I left Mawddach Residency full of wonder and inspiration, my desk is now spilling with drawings, sketchbooks and
collections. Thank you Jake Scarlett and Toby the cat for the most wonderful experience, I am forever grateful.

Freyja Needle
instagram
website

I arrived at the residency with a ridiculous amount of ‘just in case’ equipment including a variety of cameras, films, chemistry and printing without a darkroom materials. Rather than work on a specific project themes or ideas, I wanted the freedom and opportunity to experiment and creatively respond to what the light and the landscape shared with me.

When I initially read about the residency, I was particularly struck by the studio space and the incredible estuary landscape on the other side of the studio windows. I thought how amazing it would be to transform the studio into a camera obscura and project the outside environment into a room that has hosted and enabled so much
creativity inspired by that landscape.

During my second week at the residency and a dream about making the camera obscura, a day with suitable light and weather conditions arrived. Using tinfoil to create a makeshift blackout, the camera obscura appeared across the back of the studio wall and ceiling– the landscape projected upside down. Standing inside the room as a camera, in the middle of a living breathing photograph – watching the estuary water ripple across the wall, was such a special experience and amazing to be able to show/share it with my co-resident, Katie King and our host Scarlett.

On my first morning I set up tiny pin hole cameras, made from plastic film canisters, placed at intervals along the estuary. In mid-February it felt like a leap of faith to attempt to make solargraphs – using the light from the sun to record its passage across the estuary. I took them down on the last evening at the residency with no idea if anything had been recorded. I was delighted to find a set of mysterious abstract images including strange globes of grey light.

I spent time each day exploring the estuary and local area on foot, capturing images on 35mm film, polaroid and my large format pinhole camera. I was particularly struck by the layers of texture in the landscape and the movement of light. A highlight of the residency was an evening spent at the Dragon Theatre in Barmouth, listening to the local Dragon Storytellers and Ffion Phillips. In their folk tales, they talked about ‘thin spaces’ the transitional places that exist between this world and the next. Thie idea of and interpretation of ‘thin spaces’ particularly resonated with me. In the months leading up to the residency I’ve been working on a book ‘Into the trees’, using time in the darkroom as a meditative tool to creatively remember and reimagine the
sensations of time spent in nature. In the Japanese Art of Forest Bathing, Dr Li Quin (1982) describes a deeper sensory awareness of nature. He states: ‘we know this deep in our bones. It is like an intuition, or an instinct - a feeling that is sometimes hard to describe. In Japanese, we have a word for those feelings that are too deep for words: yugen. Yugen gives us a profound sense of the beauty and mystery of the universe. It is about this world but suggests something beyond it’ . Chatting together with Katie, we felt the studio space itself could be a ‘thin space’ – a place that brought about shifts in our perception – a space of awe and inspiration.

During the residency I began to explore the idea of capturing and creating thin spaces using light – something mentioned by the storytellers of things glimpsed often out of the corner of an eye. Photograms – incorporating found objects and materials into my images, is part of my photographic practice. Capturing the landscape on film,
I wrapped cellophane around my polaroid camera lens to fracture and diffuse the light. Developing my 35mm film by hand at the residency, I experimented with film soup (disrupting the development process and film surface), as a result patches of white light found their way onto my negatives. Sharing the studio space with Katie
and watching her textile practice at work, stray bit of material including fabric interfacing found their way into my film scanner and provided other opportunities to create and explore light. I began to test out ideas and explore images at the residency, using cyanotype printing and toning techniques – packets of matcha tea bought from the coop supermarket in Barmouth produced a beautiful pink/purple tone that seemed to capture the otherness of the landscape.

The residency was such a special time – the freedom to create and reflect away from the routine of daily life was such a gift. I will always remember my time there. Thank you Scarlett, Jake and Toby the cat, for making me so welcome. Thank you also Kaite King – it was such a pleasure to get to know you, have an opportunity to watch
your process and amazing textile creations grow in our studio space.

Back home from the residency I’m excited to creatively remember and revisit Mawddach in my darkroom using the negatives and to further explore the ideas inspired by my stay.

Jo Stapleton
website
instagram

Mawddach…
Out of love, respect and adoration I have shortened the residency to first name only, my Madonna, Beyonce, Britney.

I am indebted to Scarlett, Jake, Toby and my wonderful co-AIR Jo Stapleton for creating the space for such a productive, insightful and exploratory two weeks in Eyri national park.

I began my trip with a particular agenda; Go slow, play with texture in my textile practice and play with abstracting layers from a style of ‘almost touching / almost intimate’ between panelled layers to an
intersection and interweaving of layers.

I did all these things and more and spent my time reading and thinking about The Tain, the Mabinogion (which I can’t pronounce yet) and other local fairy and dragon lore. My highlight was a visit from Ffion Watkin Philips who came to tell Welsh stories at Barmouth Dragon Theatre with other local storytellers.

Understanding the cultural memory of fairy stories and recognising the way this also presses across the UK really meant a lot to me. My practice involves textiles but also animation and ritual based installations that move between nonsense and trying to link into a universal experience. Increasingly I have a desire to echo in more of UK’s pagan heritage. So to meet the fairies head-on in the local woodlands on my walks to
Arthog waterfall, to fantasise about dragons buried deep under wells under local mountains, and to look out at the estuary each day disappearing into the mist and the mountains, has been incredibly informative.

As slow practices go, my residency work is not yet finished but I expect it to be ready for my show Moon Witual which opens IMMINENTLY, (yelp) in London at Batsford Gallery on 21 March 2026 - 22 March 2026. 
The show especially features a question I have been toying with over the last 6 months in thinking about our planet’s Moon being something between a poetic mirror and an active Kali type force on our lives. It is a public
participatory performance piece that also includes an archive-image film called 18.6 Crash and new textile works made during my time at Mawddach.

Katie King
website
instagram