Resident artists, August 2025 clockwise from top left: Sophie Hoyle, Mariette Moor and Helen Stratford
For the 12th Vital Capacities residency, we partner with Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network and Wysing Arts Centre to work with UK-based artists. From 30 July, artists Sophie Hoyle, Mariette Moor and Helen Stratford will join Vital Capacities to undertake research and develop new work. Over the month-long online residency, the artists will explore new ideas, connect across disciplines and geographies, and experiment within their digital studio spaces.
The artists for July-August 2026’s residency are:
Sophie Hoyle is an artist and writer who relates personal experiences of being queer, non-binary, disabled and part of the SWANA (South-West Asian and North African) diaspora to wider forms of structural violence. From lived experience of psychiatric conditions and trauma (or PTSD), they began to explore the politics of healthcare inequalities and collective and intergenerational trauma.
–
cannibal licks tricks stuffed sticky body undone untouched mutate to escape by the skin of our teeth
Mariette Moor‘s interdisciplinary practice holds drawing, clay and writing at its core, operating as modes of storytelling that tease at the uncanny peripheries of horror and their relationship to boundaries, absence, and control. I imagine ‘world fracturing’ as a methodology to mix the mundane, fantastical and paranoid into psychological scenes, questioning the nature of reality and sanity. Tenderness and violence coexist in speculative bodies and spaces which confront the complexities of intimacy.
–
Helen Stratford’s practice spans architecture, fine art, writing and research. Through performative workshops, site-specific interventions, video, speculative writing, and discursive platforms, they propose ways of challenging spatial prejudices produced at the intersections of social, cultural, economic and political relations. Her work has been exhibited at V&A, Oslo Architecture Triennale, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Bloc Projects, Kettle’s Yard and Wysing Arts Centre. Led by her lived experience of chronic pain and personal health histories, she is currently researching crip time (en)counters with public space, ecology, architecture, and productivity. Helen is also Senior Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University.
An online exhibition showcasing work developed during the residency will be presented on vitalcapacities.com in September 2026.
Residency launches on 30 July 2026 – find out what the artists are up to by following their progress at: vitalcapacities.com and on Instagram: @vitalcapacities
Vital Capacities is an accessible, purpose-built digital residency space, that supports artists’ practice while engaging audiences with their work.
Vital Capacities has been created by videoclub in consultation with artists, digital inclusion specialist Sarah Pickthall and website designer Oli Pyle.
Vital Capacities 2026 residency is supported by Arts Council England.
