Chapel Arts Studios (CAS) is delighted to announce its forthcoming artist residency at Andover Library on the 1st and 2nd of November, featuring Dr Laurence Dubé-Rushby.
Freshly inspired by the Venice Contemporary Art Biennale 2024 theme, ‘Foreigners Everywhere’, Laurence invites the public to explore, confront, and embrace strangeness and the uncanny through the transformative power of art.
Laurence Dubé-Rushby, a French artist based in the UK since 1996, brings twenty-eight years of experience in leading community-centred art projects. Following the completion of her doctorate in creative pedagogy and performance art at Arts University Bournemouth (AUB) and University Arts London (UAL) in June 2024, Laurence continues to explore themes of environmental ethics, heritage, education, printmaking, textiles, and performance art in her practice.
This residency at Andover Library, guided by the theme ‘We Are All Stranger-Artists’, invites families and children to engage directly with these ideas through mixed-media performances, mask-making, and printmaking activities.
Laurence’s work celebrates the diversity of creative expression, echoing the Biennale’s focus on ‘the self-taught artist, the folk artist, the craft maker, and the artista popular’—those who have historically been perceived as outsiders in their own communities. Her interactive performance-installation encourages participants to embrace the stranger within themselves, weaving their unique stories into a shared and evolving collective narrative.
During the residency, participants will have the opportunity to interact with a film projection that Laurence created during her British Council Research Fellowship residency in Venice in 2019. This immersive piece encourages viewers to step into a world connected through water, air, stones, and earth—inviting a deeper understanding of how art allows us to encounter and inhabit the perspectives of others.
Laurence’s work has been showcased internationally, including in Ecotone, a performance and film presented at the British Pavilion Basement in Venice in 2019. Her practice is grounded in social engagement and participation, exploring how art can become a means of resistance and reflection.
For more information, visit www.chapelartsstudios.co.uk