Artist in Residence Programme
IOU has created a rolling 6 month opportunity for artists to live, work and develop their creative practice at the IOU Hebden Bridge Hostel
The Artist in Residency opportunity is open to artists specialising in any art form and interested in IOU’s approach. The residency includes living rent and bill free in a private artist bedroom to develop their practice and create an art project in response to their time spent living at the Hostel.
In 2022 we welcomed our first artists – Charlotte Mellor Meecham and Bodie Doyle who helped us launch the hostel with Charlotte’s unique illustrations and Bodie’s approach to outdoor graphic art.
Following an open call for our Winter 2022 residency, which received a high number of responses from artists of all disciplines and communities we have appointed Alicja Mrozowska as Artist in Residence from November 2022- April 2023.
Launched in April 2022 the Hostel is a unique way for IOU to engage with local residents and visitors to Calderdale and to support artists, creatives and the cultural ecology of the region.
With 14 bedrooms, sleeping up to 40 the independent vegetarian Hostel is set in stunning woodland and gardens in the vibrant town of Hebden Bridge, with excellent transport links to Leeds and Manchester. The hostel welcomes solo travellers and groups all year round and is available for exclusive hire for retreats, workshops, meetings and team building events.
The Hostel is not for profit, with surplus reinvested into the IOU artist community and hostel programme.
Our outgoing live-in Artist in Residence, Charlotte Meller Meecham, completed her art and sound project at the IOU Hebden Bridge Hostel and the result are these beautiful customised headphones that our Hostel guests can use for their own exclusive silent disco.
Introducing our IOU Hebden Bridge Hostel Artists in Residence
Alicja Mrozowska
Alicja’s practice explores identity and the concept of ‘home’ through oil painting, film photography, paper construction and technology. She incorporates her own experiences, surroundings and relationships with nods to social structures, in a lighthearted way. These multidimensional artworks hope to prompt acceptance, curiosity and vulnerability. Alongside exhibiting her work, Alicja has participated in group residencies and led creative workshops in the UK, Poland and Germany.
Charlotte Meller Meecham
Charlotte is a freelance multi-disciplinary artist, based between Hebden Bridge and Portugal. Within her art practice, she likes to use a variety of mediums. These range from more traditional approaches, such as analogue photography and printing, making and sculpture or sewing and illustration, through to more digital work for her visuals, animation or her posters and design work. Alongside this, she also makes and sells her own designs of handmade headdresses and through the summer, while working as the IOU Hebden Bridge Hostel artist in residence, she customised a series of headphones for a sound/art project, with the idea that the guests of the Hostel could use them for ‘silent discos’
Bodie Cameron
Bodie is a freelance multi-disciplinary artist, based between Hebden Bridge and Portugal"A chair is still a chair, even when there's no one sittin' there But a chair is not a house and a house is not a home." When I was 20 I talked to Dionne Warwick on the phone in a house I couldn't afford to rent and eventually had to flee. Dionne has a song called "A House Is Not A Home''. It was written for her by Bacharach and David for a film of the same name. The film is about a New York Madam called Polly Adler who ran a bordello in Manhattan. When I was 33 I lived a few blocks away from Polly Adler's in a flophouse on the Bowery, it was £10 a night and the rooms had no ceilings. I've moved house a total of 38 times, I'm not sure if I ever moved home. The work I am making at the IOU Hostel is about home- what makes one, what you call it, how it feels to get there.