Creative Scotland and Shape Arts are delighted to announce the recipient of their collaborative disabled artist bursary, Daisy Lafarge. 

Back to Crip Arte Spazio Visit Daisy's website

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Daisy received a £5,000 artist bursary and will travel to the Venice Biennale in late September 2024 to undertake a week-long research trip, hosted by Shape Arts in connection with their landmark Disability Arts Movement exhibition Crip Arte Spazio: DAM in Venice.

Daisy is a renowned interdisciplinary writer based in Glasgow who graduated in Fine Art from Edinburgh College of Art in 2016. The form and content of her work is diverse, but it is often research-led and propelled by the merging of unlikely subjects, such as science, romance, metaphor and ecology.

Over recent years Daisy has been experimenting with new ways of integrating her written and visual practices - including video work, performance and painting. This opportunity to visit Venice, meeting other artists and drawing inspiration from a range of contemporary practices, comes at a pivotal moment in her practice and will be the starting point for the development of new ways of working in the future.

This artist bursary is a new collaborative project between Creative Scotland and Shape Arts and is supported by The National Lottery through Creative Scotland. It recognises the need for more disabled voices within an international art context.

David Hevey, Shape CEO and DAM IN VENICE curator said “Shape is delighted to work with Creative Scotland and extend the opportunity to engage with our DAM IN VENICE project to Scottish artists, thus creating new and wider connections and championing new creative voices. We look forward to supporting Daisy through this opportunity.”

Kirsteen Macdonald, Visual Arts Officer at Creative Scotland said “We are excited to announce this unique opportunity for Daisy Lafarge to undertake new research in parallel with Shape’s incredible exhibition at the Venice Biennial this year. It will be fascinating to see how the experiences of this trip impact her work in future by supporting her to experiment and test new ideas inspired by her encounters in Venice with time back home reflecting on what this brings to her creative practice.”

Daisy Lafarge is an interdisciplinary writer and artist based in Glasgow. Her publications include the poetry collection Life Without Air (Granta 2020), a novel, Paul (Granta, 2021), and a nonfiction book on intimacy and infection, Lovebug (Peninsula, 2023). Her visual work has been exhibited at Tate St Ives, Talbot Rice Gallery, Serpentine Galleries’ online programme and elsewhere, and acquired by the University of Edinburgh Art Collection.

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Banner image: installation shot of Crip Arte Spazio, credit Andy Barker. Headshot of Daisy Lafarge, courtesy of the artist. Description: composite image made up of two photographs. The first is an installation photograph of the Crip Arte Spazio exhibition, focused on the Keith Armstrong photographic archive. The second, on the right of the composite, is a headshot of artist Daisy Lafarge, a white woman with very curly brown hair and a fringe, wearing a rich pink vest in a satin-like material.