Applications are open for Fluid Earth, the title of GroundWork Gallery’s fifth annual artist residency and exhibition programme for 2025\. It builds on our track-record of environmental art residencies which have taken a strongly inter-disciplinary approach. We welcome broad and imaginative approaches to the subject.

  
**Extractivism: the overarching theme**

The overall concept for the residency up till now has been about extraction and extractivism: the removal of resources from the earth, whether natural or otherwise.

  
Extractivism describes an overarching attitude which legitimises removal as a default, as opposed to replenishing resources or thinking in terms of regeneration. This is often accompanied by an assumption that extraction is a permissible exercise without full consideration of the longer-term implications for sustainability, for pollution, or of ownership of the materials or environments affected.

  
The artists in residence have to date taken rigorous perspectives. They have been drawing attention to overconsumption and using resources with enormous sensitivity. They have highlighted little-known practices and properties of materials, minimizing or making effective use of waste products. Results of their work can be seen in the exhibition pages since 2020, the more recent ones being The Ground Beneath Our Feet, 2023 and Ground Up, 2024\. Ground Water is also part of that theme.

For all chosen artists the residency includes a research week based in King’s Lynn, followed by 10 days production residency based at 1 of the 3 participating sites. The emphasis of this second phase will differ, depending on location.

There are 3 residency locations: The GroundWork Gallery, King’s Lynn; The Grange Projects, Great Cressingham and Broomhill, Reepham.

  
Alongside the residency period from 4 August to 10 September there will be an exhibition in the gallery Ground Water, featuring artists from the 2024 residency. It is followed by the Fluid Earth exhibition from 4 October to 13 December, for which each resident artist will be considered.

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