Creative Spark is delighted to introduce the latest Artist-in-Residence for 2023 Scarlett Rebecca.

Scarlett is an artist and educator based in Wales, working predominantly with the lithographic printmaking process, including the endangered craft of stone lithography.

Scarlett has exhibited widely in a number of independent shows and larger mixed exhibitions. Highlights include Stone Letter Project, TRI-ANGLE Gallery, Japan 2017, The Contemporary Young Artist Award in March 2020, Newcastle, Print International, Ty Pawb, December 2021 and The Contemporary Printmaking Prize at Fen Ditton Gallery in April 2023.

Scarlett’s work is a reflective and introspective approach to making, a meditation on themes of evolution, the afterlife and associated folklore. Scarlett uses the figure, overlaid with pattern, as a narrative device to explore these themes and confront her own mortality. By combining patterns with the figure, she makes the viewer question the existential nature of the subject and its surface. 

Scarlett’s artistic practice is deeply rooted in the practice of drawing, always returning to portraiture, the drawing is then taken through lithography and relief print processes.  

During her residency at Creative Spark, Scarlett will be researching the contemporary, historical and folkloric practices of death rituals within Dundalk and Ireland. She plans to take inspiration from the stone age passage tomb at Newgrange, the iron age sacrificial bog bodies at Dublin Museum and the newly opened Irish Wake Museum in Waterford. Scarlett will also be drawing upon the wealth of historic and folkloric sites within Dundalk, and the currently held local beliefs and practices to inform her work.