George Clark and Eiko Soga are Camden Art Centre’s first family in residence, setting up the residency studio as a collective space to work and make alongside their young family. The pair look to use their residency as an opportunity to think through new methods of making within the shifting states of their family environment.
George Clark is an artist and writer working across, film, installation and performance. His work focuses on moving image in the expanded field as he explores new modes of exchange, collaboration and dialogue in a global context with a particular interest in the non-aligned histories of the Global South.
Over the last decade Clark has used experimental approaches to archival and cinematic imaginaries. Often collaborating with other artists and collectives, his films embrace non-linear, fragmented narratives as he questions how histories are constructed and how they are governed by culture, technology and social political concerns.
Eiko Soga is an artist and a researcher, working with moving images, photography, poetry, and installation. Through storytelling and interdisciplinary practice, she explores embodied knowledge and the relationships between emotional and natural landscapes within the more-than-human world.
Her long-term engagement with the Indigenous Ainu community in Hokkaido, Japan, led her to question and unlearn the social norms shaped by her upbringing and education in Tokyo and London. Through learning how to prepare traditional Ainu dishes across different seasons in 2020-21, she spent time with local people and engaging with their lived experiences and multispecies encounters. She approaches everyday life as a form of creative process, exploring alternative ways of exchanging knowledge.
Working in artistic collaboration with each other for the first time, Clark and Soga are hoping to explore their emerging interest in children’s prelinguistic worlds and the sonic resonances that are absorbed from pregnancy through to phonic formulation in multilingual children. Having taken sonic recordings in an anechoic chamber during the pregnancy of their second child, they are wanting to expand these field recordings as they look to create an active recording and experimental space within the residency studio.
Their work is engaged in dialogue with the philosophies of Japanese farmer Fukuoka Masanobu, to explore artistic practice and filmmaking as a form of permaculture – as responses to the ecologies and rhythms of the multiple ecosystems they inhabit.
Recently they have been inspired by Marui Noen (children’s farm) in Tokyo where children are taught agricultural practices through play with soil, insects and plants to gain a material understanding of their relationships to food and care for the environment. Clark and Soga are similarly looking to explore what it means to bring children into their lives and through this process consider how they can be more collaborative and ecologically conscious within their work, using natural processes and ingredients found from their surroundings, as they embrace these experimental outcomes while stepping away from the fixed certainties of film production.
This residency has been programmed in dialogue with Nisha Matthew, a London-based curator and researcher.
George Clark (b. West Yorkshire) lives and works in London. He is an artist, curator and researcher. Clark has exhibited both nationally and internationally with recent works and projects including: Sunless Haven (2024); Karmapala Through The Forbidden Scenes (2023 with Bunga Siagian), Scattered Body or a World Uncovered by Dust (2023); Handle with Care (2020 – 2024); Motherbank (2020 – ongoing); A Mountain Inside a Cave (2019); Double Ghost (2018); Jatiwangi/The Scent of Jati Trees (2018); Sea of Clouds (2016); Untitled (Eyemo rolls) (2011- ongoing).
In 2020, Clark, founded Motherbank with long-term collaborators Ismal Muntaha and Bunga Siagian and Wates village in Indonesia. This project was developed to support a mother’s collective as an experiment in redistribution to enable local autonomy to grow community resources in Wates. Handle With Care (2020-2024) explored ways of articulating memories from the personal to the collective, through engagement with two distinct archives: the Vietnam Film Institute in Hanoi and the An Viet Archives in Hackney that Clark helped to establish in 2023. Prior to this in 2018 Clark founded the West Java West Yorkshire Coop Movement with Bunga Siagian, Ismal Muntaha, Will Rose and the Jatiwangi Art Factory. This cooperative was developed as a way of initiating an interlocal series of commissions, exchanges and residency opportunities between West Yorkshire and West Java. He is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Westminster and his work is distributed by LUX.
Eiko Soga (b. Tokyo) lives and works in London. She is a UK-based Japanese artist and researcher working across moving image, photography, poetry, and installation. Soga has exhibited nationally and internationally with recent works including: Scent Line on a Moving Mountain (2025), Felt Knowledge: Ecologising Art and Samani Ainu Cooking (2018-2022) My Neighbours Meal (2021), Ainu Hunter, Mon-chan (2020), Tuning Bamboo & Bamboo Tori (2019), Autumn Salmon (2015-2019).
Since 2024 Soga has been developing a new collaboration with Maarui Children’s Farm in Tokyo as well as her ongoing engagement with Japan’s Indigenous Ainu community in Hokkaido. Between 2020 and 2021, Soga lived in Samani, Hokkaido in Japan learning indigenous Samani Ainu cooking across different seasons from Ms Kane Kumagai. Through this project she sought to question how an art practice can explore ‘felt knowledge’ of the more-than-human world resulting in film installation, text, and a photographic record of this time.
Since becoming a mother in 2023 Soga has turned her attention to children, asking: How might children’s sense of play help us reimagine our relationship with nature? Her recent work brings together filmmaking, children’s creative practices, ecological research, and traditional knowledge to explore new ways of understanding and relating to the natural world. She is currently a Randall MacIver Junior Research Fellowship in Fine Art at University of Oxford.
Running for over 30 years, Camden Art Centre’s residency programme provides a nurturing and empowering environment for artists to reflect on and develop their practice within a public institution. It provides a supportive space to take risks and experiment with new ideas.
Camden At Centre’s residency artists have use of an on-site studio, technical and curatorial support, access to a public audience, and mentoring opportunities.
To date, the programme has supported over 100 artists and built a strong legacy, with 12 artist-in-residence having gone on to be nominated for the Turner Prize, including four winners.
