Cove Park Autumn Micro Residency
Residency
Cove Park, Scotland
Artist: Ayda Pakzad Afshar
5–9 October 2026
Spatial collage, installation and moving-image experiments
Overview
My five days at Cove Park were an opportunity to experiment with an idea that had emerged from my ongoing research, The Coveration of Eve.
During my earlier residency at Hospitalfield, I had been exploring the idea of a woman choosing to leave the image in which she had been represented. This gradually led me to another question: what happens to the traces she leaves behind?
These traces might take many forms, photographs, documents, recordings, gestures or fragments of images. Once the body is no longer present, someone else may collect, arrange and interpret what remains. But how much of the story that emerges belongs to the person who left? And how might that story change if the same traces were arranged differently?
This was where the idea of spatial collage began to take shape for me. I wanted to bring these questions into a physical space, where images, fragments, shadows and the living body could exist in relation to one another, and where those relationships might change through movement and time.
During the Residency
I began by suspending empty paper frames at different depths, experimenting with light, shadows and the presence and absence of my own body.
As the experiments developed, I introduced printed fragments of Eve's body from historical images. I worked with these fragments alongside the frames and their shadows, using photography and video to observe how different arrangements could produce different images.
I also began experimenting with my own movement within the installation, both as a body entering and leaving the space, and as a presence capable of changing the relationships between its elements.
The work developed through a series of small tests, documented in photographs, moving images and a research notebook.
Moving-Image Experiments
Through slow movement, I explored how the living body could become part of a composition made from images, fragments and shadows.
The camera captured temporary arrangements that appeared and disappeared as the body moved. Each moment offered a slightly different way of seeing the same elements.
Reflection
What interested me most at Cove Park was not simply bringing collage into three dimensions, but beginning to think about how a story might be constructed through the arrangement of what remains.
I had been working with collage for a long time, but here I could begin to question the relationships between its elements in a different way. They were no longer fixed to a surface. The body could enter, interrupt, connect or leave them behind.
I began to see the possibility of a collage that changes not only through the artist's arrangement of fragments, but through presence, absence and movement.
These were early experiments, and there are still many questions I want to explore, particularly around the role of the body in shaping, or perhaps reclaiming, a story constructed from its traces.
Programme:
Cove Park Autumn Micro Residency
Dates:
5–9 October 2026
Location:
Cove Park, Scotland
Artist:
Ayda Pakzad Afshar
Research:
The Coveration of Eve
Investigation:
The Body Becomes Collage
Cohort
Autumn Micro Residency — October 2026
Related
Refusal to Remain Visible
Visual research / Hospitalfield Interdisciplinary Residency
August 2026
What happens when the body chooses to leave?
