Stevie Ronnie | Baltic|States Residency 2025 (UK)

BIO

Stevie Ronnie is an interdisciplinary artist based in Northumberland, UK. At the heart of his practice is an intrinsic enquiry into language: its intricacies and its material possibilities. He is interested in what cannot be said and what is lost in translation in the context of our changing world.

Stevie’s work has been exhibited across the UK, Europe, Japan and the USA, including group shows at: Urawa Art Museum, Tokyo; Baltic, Gateshead; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Centre for Book Arts, New York; and Centre for Literature, Münster. His works are held in public and private collections worldwide including those of the British Library, the Bodleian Library, Urawa Art Museum and UCA. Stevie has received two MacDowell Fellowship in the US for his interdisciplinary works and has published several books of poetry, which have been recognised through a Northern Writers Award, a Jerwood / Arvon menteeship and three longlistings in the UK National Poetry competition. In 2023 he was selected for the John Moores Painting Prize and in 2024 he was named on the shortlist for the Alpine Fellowship Visual Arts Prize.

PROJECT

During his residency at NART, Stevie made and presented several new multisensory artworks inspired by his research into the materiality of language and the connections between the industrial heritages of Eastern Estonia and North Eastern England. These works were informed by engagement with the Kreeholm factory site, the community at NART and a local Kindergarten.

Taking the form of a suspended remnant and presented within the abandoned weaving halls of the Kreenholm factory, the installation ‘Love | Armastus | Любовь’ explored the materiality of love, labour and memory by layering braille translations of the word ‘love’ in English, Estonian and Russian. The braille in the piece was painted in egg tempera onto tengujo spider tissue, a paper commonly used for the repair and conservation of precious artworks and documents. Exploring material connections between post-industrial sites in Narva and Northumberland, Stevie combined pigments ground from Kreenholm factory bricks and stone from the Walker’s Pottery in Northumberland to make the tempera paint. Members of the community at NART participated in the process of making this work through a communal process of repeated crumpling that transformed the texture of its surface.

Among the other works produced by Stevie in Narva are: a poetic and playfully tactile audio work in the form of a paper rope made with found materials from the Kreenholm factory and a poem inspired by his Kindergarten visit; an artist book exploring the duality of belonging in a borderland; and a painting on fine tissue paper designed to slowly decay as a result of contact with the rusted wire from Kreenholm that it has been stretched onto. The painting and artist book were made using pigments that Stevie ground by hand from found materials in Narva, which included bricks and flecks of paint from the Kreenholm site.

The residency took place in collaboration with the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and Kai Art Centre.