2024 Winner — Kirsty Robertson

Kirsty Robertson is Professor of Contemporary Art and Director of Museum and Curatorial Studies in the Department of Visual Arts at Western University (ON). Her project takes one of the most common manufactured items in the world – a synthetic textile – and uses its disintegration to read the world. Synthetic fabrics like nylon and polyester break down into plastic microfibers, which disperse into air, soil, and water, and make their way into the farthest reaches of the world and even into outer space. But microfibers also reconfigure and coagulate into strange anthropogenic objects such as fatbergs (formed in sewers from wet wipes and discarded oils) and neptune balls (spherical conglomerations of sea grasses and plastic fibers). Moving from the world of high fashion through to the garbage dump, this project traces the growing impact of microfibers. In addition to the publication of a book, it is the researcher's intention that this residency project will lead to an exhibition of these anthropogenic "artifacts" alongside works by contemporary artists in dialogue with them.

2023 Winner — Josianne Poirier

Art historian, writer, and independent curator Josianne Poirier is also a sessional lecturer at the Université du Québec à Montréal and Université de Montréal. Her work is situated at the intersection between art, culture, and the production of space.

During her residency at the Grantham Foundation, Poirier will research the value of darkness, an endangered natural resource that is indispensable to the balance of ecosystems. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, she will try to explore representations of semi-darkness and the affective experience associated with it, as well as better understand its importance for living beings. To this end, Poirier will invite experts from different fields—artists, astronomers, biologists, art historians—to join her for a series of radio interviews that will take place at the Grantham Foundation in the year following her residency.

The Grantham Foundation has two winners for the year 2022.

2022 Winner — Heather Davis

Canadian Heather Davis is a professor at the New School’s Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts in New York City. An interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of environmental humanities, media studies and visual culture, Davis has for a number of years focused on the way the saturation of fossil fuels shapes contemporary culture. The residency at the Grantham Foundation will enable her to begin work on a new book titled Petro-Time. 

Davis is co-editor of Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments, and Epistemologies (2014), editor of Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada (2017) and author of Plastic Matter (Duke UP, 2022).

2022 Winner — Estelle Zhong Mengual

Estelle Zhong Mengual is the holder of the Inhabiting the Landscape Chair at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She looks at the environmental history of art as a counter-history, a potential link between the visual arts and environmental issues, in order to transform our relationship and, more specifically, our sensitivity, to the living world. During her residency at the Grantham Foundation, Zhong Mengual will further explore this perspective with a view to writing and publishing a new work accessible to a wider readership.

Zhong Mengual is the author of Esthétique de la rencontre. L’énigme de l’art contemporain (with Baptiste Morizot), Seuil, 2018, L’Art en commun. Réinventer les formes du collectif en contexte démocratique, Presses du réel, 2019 and Apprendre à voir. Le point de vue du vivant, Actes Sud, 2021. 

2021 Winner — Clément de Gaulejac

Artist, illustrator and author of several books, Clément de Gaulejac holds a PhD (Études et pratiques des arts) from the Université du Québec à Montreal. His thesis is entitled You See What I Mean, Illustrations, Metaphors and Other Images that Speak. In recent years, environmental issues have been at the heart of de Gaujelac’s work. His concern is expressed artistically in the form of political posters and exhibitions (Les Naufrageurs, Centre Vox, 2015 and Les maîtres du monde sont des gens, Galerie UQO, 2019).

As part of his month-long residency at the Grantham Foundation, based on publications such as those of Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Vinciane Despret and Barbara Stiegler, Clément de Gaulejac will write a research paper aimed at highlighting, analyzing and questioning a number of visual images and metaphors used to represent the climate crisis.