Amy Strzoda Announced as Emerging Artist in Residence for 2025
Mount Stuart Trust is delighted to announce Amy Strzoda as their Emerging Artist in Residence for 2025/26. The residency, established in 2018, focuses on socially engaged practice and gives artists at the start of their careers the opportunity to evolve their practice in response to the Isle of Bute.
Amy Strzoda by Patrick Bramley for Muine Bheag Arts
On Bute, Amy hopes to engage with island communities, exploring relationships and connections between people through communal singing and dancing. These forms of expression ignite happiness and nostalgia and generate joy, encouraging participants to celebrate one another.
Dancing and singing on a large scale is often reserved for children’s activities or professional performers, limiting adults’ ability to express themselves in this way. For this project everyone on Bute will be welcome to participate, regardless of their experience with performance, creating an inclusive space for a wide variety of voices, opinions and contributions across artforms, showcasing the identity of Bute today.
Throughout her residency Amy will support the creation of an informal archive for Bute and its residents, developing the island’s own contemporary mythology through performance and music.
Curator of Contemporary at Mount Stuart, Morven Gregor, said: Mount Stuart Trust is delighted to be hosting the Emerging Artist Residency again this year, with support from Creative Scotland. Amy was selected through an Open Call process, and the panel all look forward to her realising her plans on Bute.
About the Artist
Amy Strzoda graduated from Glasgow School of Art with a Bachelors degree in Sculpture and Environmental Art. As part of her degree Amy focused on community centred artworks, working with friends to create a film work highlighting the essential nature of friendship as part of art making, prioritising vital connections and experiences. She was awarded the Bram Stoker Award for the most imaginative artwork at the GSA 2022 Degree Show and will be the first recipient since the 1980s to receive a physical award, specially crafted by GSA graduate and member of the school’s silversmithing and jewellery staff team, Caius Bearder, based on the original design for the award from 1900.
Amy is the founder and conductor for The Choir, formed following her selection for the Royal Scottish Academy’s 2024 New Contemporaries exhibition. Since the conception The Choir has performed at The Royal Scottish Academy, Glasgow International 2024, and as part of 24 Things to Tell You, a 24-hour public artwork where a different intervention occurred in Glasgow, every hour of the day.
In January 2025, artist Craig McCorquodale invited The Choir to perform as part of a public art day at The Glasgow Dental Hospital on Sauchiehall Street. The hospital was the site of a refugee centre during World War II, and the subject of Chitra Ramaswamy’s book Homelands, a memoir exploring the life of a couple who met in Glasgow after fleeing Nazi Germany. The Choir sang ‘Die Gedanken Sind Frei’, a German anti-fascist protest song.
In summer 2024 Muine Bheag Arts invited Amy to host an event as part of their COMMUNE programme in the town’s community centre, teaching Ceilidh dances set to traditional and non-traditional music.
The Emerging Artist Residency at Mount Stuart is supported by Creative Scotland.