In 2025 I was delighted to become the Ignite Somerset Artist in Residence and part of Somerset Art Weeks. The Residency enabled me to explore, and transport, my artist’s studio using new and innovative digital media to the Engine Room in Bridgwater. My practice explores relationships with past, present and future temporality (in other words how we exist in time and place). I often work with moving image, ceramics and installation art. I am influenced by human made and natural landscapes, science fiction, histories and memory, with all their intertwined connections and disconnections.

At home my studio is a semi restored old cider barn, part of which contains my ceramic equipment. In what was the old dairy (where the predominant purpose was the workaday labour of cleaning and sterilising the milking equipment), the wall still holds my father’s semi-illegible pencil writing that records long gone cattle sales, milk churn pick-ups, scribbles of the date of farm dogs’ deaths and MOTs. Upstairs I access further spaces that hold a shambolic archive of items from family history, my art materials and remnants of previous art projects. Here I make assemblages, project my films and test ideas whilst living alongside my rural heritage.

My proposal for this Residency was to create work that reflected a deeper interrogation of time and place around this space. For me the building is not just a place where physical outcomes are realised it is also a space where ideas and influences are questionned, imagined and crystallised. The Residency offered a real potential to deeply consider key elements of my practice and transplant these via a form of digital time travel to the Engine Room - to become a digital archive of ideas, images and objects, and an exploration  of local environment and landscape.

To realise this, I had to leap into a Virtual world. With the expert guidance of Daniel Birch at Somerset Film I have spent the weeks testing and digitally enhancing my practice with Polycam and LiDAR 3D scanning techniques to create a VR world with a sonic dimension. Alongside VR I have also used 360-degree cameras and various sound recording techniques to create an archive of field recordings and film footage. This has opened new and exciting possibilities for my art practice within an immersive environment.

A key part of this Residency has been the testing of technologies and deciding what produces or enhances a convincing realism/representation of thing/feeling/place – of how we move through the world and environment we find ourselves in.

You can explore this space for yourself at https://www.spatial.io/s/Tina-Salvidge-Main-Yard-689f048fc5f5332ab858f99b