Artists we’re working with…
Emerging Artist Award 2023
The emerging Artist Award is a year-long development opportunity including a £2000 bursary, for two Scotland based artists, this years awardees are Chao-Ying Rao (aka Femme Castratrice) and Emily Furneaux…
Funded by Creative Scotland and supported by Take Me Somewhere and CCA.
Chao-Ying Rao aka Femme Castratrice
Chao-Ying Rao (performing under Femme Castratrice) is an East Asian visual and performance artist whose practice involves negotiating complexities around objectification and narcissism, often using humour as a tool to disarm and charm the viewer. She is interested in the absurdity of desire, excessive consumption, racial and bodily fetishisation, and abject femininity. Her background in dance comes from years of working as a stripper in Edinburgh and London. Rao is inspired by vintage playboy centrefolds and misogynistic pop culture truisms. Working with Kristeva’s theory of abjection and Creed’s monstrous feminine, her performances play with that very fine line between attraction and repulsion.
Emily Furneaux
Emily Furneaux is a multi-disciplinary artist working across performance, writing, drawing, food and culinary events. She is guided by her lived experience; often weaving autobiographical narratives into relatable shapes and collaborative processes.
Last year she honoured the end of her near twenty year love affair with the cigarette with the performative launch of a new collection of autobiographical writings 'Ciggie Stories: Twenty Tales of Love & Sorrow'. Furneaux will be self-publishing the collection, in their own cigarette box, later this year.
Despite her smoking habit Furneaux is an ultramarathon runner and a huge advocate of creative approaches to running, leading a collaborative research project Artists vs Athletes that looks at the value of cross pollinating art and sport.
In 2020 Furneaux set-up a lifelong dining project Above & Alone - where people that don't know each other come together to share carefully curated menus. Recent iterations include Mon£y M£al (Round 2) where a group of people shared food that looked like cash and talked about their relationships with money, outside Barclays Bank.