PROFORMA

What happens during a year long artist residency?

Join us in Manchester this September to find out as we share reflections of our COMPASS project.

Over the past year, this project has connected artists Emma Illingworth and Margaret O’Brien (both Greater Manchester based) with Kimberley Foster and Jane Scobie (both Norfolk based) through residencies at Cromer Artspace and Rogue Artist Studios.

The sharing event will include an update from each artist about their experiences and work so far along with a presentation from Chris Bailkoski covering COMPASS, artist residencies and funding strategies.  

Date: 26/09/2026
Time: 12pm - 5pm
Venue: The Salutation Pub
12 Higher Chatham Street, Manchester, M15 6ED
The Salutation 

Ticket Link in Bio 🔗

If you require any further information, please contact Chris Bailkoski at [email protected]

Image: Photo Collage ©️Kimberley Foster

This project is kindly supported by Arts Council England and Arts Fundraising and Philanthropy

💫Work with us 📝

Drawing on our experiences at PROFORMA (since 2018!) we are now offering arts consultancy and development as part of our services.

This includes:
* Residencies
* Funding
* Project Management
* Curation
* Mentorship
* Community Building
* Professional Development

We are offering free 20mins, no obligation, remote introductory meetings on the First Thursday of each month where we can discuss ways of potentially working together.

First Thursdays:
*7th May*
- [ ] 10am
- [ ] 12pm
- [ ] 2pm

*4th June*
- [ ] 10am
- [ ] 12pm
- [ ] 2pm

*2nd July*
- [ ] 10am
- [ ] 12pm
- [ ] 2pm

Get in touch [email protected] DM, or follow link in bio for further information and to book your free session

🧭COMPASS: Manchester 🧭

Sharing artist reflections from our residency in Manchester at Rogue Studios.

Through my physical navigation of the school and its surroundings I feel free and rebellious. I am allowed to do this but there is still the dominance of past instruction surrounding me.  

Disobedience runs wild in relation to the school, but I am playing the game of practice. 

Embedded and scratched into the wooden floor, the walls and the playground, the lines guide differently as though an old language, half-forgotten and spoken through its patina.

Kimberley Foster

Artwork: ©️ Kimberley Foster

🧭COMPASS: Manchester 🧭

Sharing artist reflections from our residency in Manchester at Rogue Studios.

Town Gate Teleportation Device, The Fatcanflub magazine, Volume 3 Issue 2

In this issue, Fatcanflub readers opened their magazines to discover a teleportation device between the pages. Magazine were places on bedroom floors, front door steps and local beaches however readers found themselves stood on the tarmac of my hometown street in West Yorkshire.

This work is an iteration of a series of performances and teleportations in which I question how materials and resources available to me can be used to bridge distance and amplify hometown love.

The series, which began during the first COMPASS residency with PROFORMA, carried on through the second residency at and continues beyond.

The Fatcanflub is run by and is free, dm to be added to the mailing list.

Emma Illingworth

Artwork: ©️ Emma Illingworth

🧭COMPASS: Manchester 🧭

Sharing artist reflections from our residency in Manchester at Rogue Studios.

I bookended my residency with two interventions – the releasing of bullrush seed into the last vestige of the Stockton Branch Canal and floating a raft on Gorton Reservoir. Marking my twice daily walks from the start of the canal to the reservoir with gifts offered from Norfolk.  Gorton comes from the word Gore meaning – marsh. So, marsh to marsh. 
 
The buried Stockport Branch Canal, now a path, runs directly behind Rogue Artists’ Studios. Surfacing regularly, hiding layers of industrial past behind todays industrial present. The granite setts of the towpath are likely from Scotland – who cut them? who laid them? who walked them? You can sense the tramp of the horses under Packhorse Bridge and still see weary people travelling to and from work, now as then. The smell of water hidden in the viaduct mingles with the acrid factory and diesel smells of today. Research throws up images of Rogue when it was a School in 1960 and the vast mills in 1840’s. The walk is a deep seam of social history and a window into the now.
 
Jane Scobie

Artwork: Releasing bulrush seeds ©️ Jane Scobie

🧭COMPASS: Manchester 🧭

Sharing artist reflections from our residency in Manchester at Rogue Studios.

What a wily thing: a dancer, a swimmer, a creature… something to be tamed; the untameable. Of itself, its own self – unyielding, obstinate, adamant.
It is light, wind, air, energy. A windsock, a weathervane, a puff of air.
Lightmeter.
Here for now but not for long. To articulate the inarticulable.Precarity, absurdity, vulnerability, being.
 
During Compass residency at Rogue Manchester, I have continued exploring emotional and existential concepts of be-ing - what it is to be in a body, in a place, in the world, in one’s head - with site-responsive playful interventions that address site, space, material and convention through the idea of shelter.

Margaret O’Brien

Artwork: The Impossible - detail 8©️ Margaret O’Brien

🧭COMPASS: Manchester 🧭

Sharing artist reflections from our first week in Manchester at Rogue Studios.

‘The school hall is an expansive space that once activated bare-feet, plimsolls, apparatus, hoops and balls. There are new games available here, rules of art and exhibition. But when you cast your eyes downward, this is not a neutral space; a used-disused school. The marks on the floor tell us something. My ribbon wants to play trying to join in with the slightly erased and faded marks of games played before. It is glossier - like a new pupil on their first day of school, wearing shiny shoes to reveal their newness. I can almost hear the children- although it is quiet - I think of maypole dancing and embedded pedagogies. We materially sing for a moment, like morning has broken during an assembly.’
Kimberley Foster

Image: ©️Kimberley Foster






Norfolk
Cromer

🧭COMPASS: Manchester 🧭

Sharing artist reflections from our first week in Manchester at Rogue Studios.

‘Cromer to Gorton: rural to urban. I am at Rogue artist’s studio in Manchester for part 2 of the Proforma Compass residency. Based in a vast converted red brick Victorian school, surrounded by traces of industrial past and modern factories. 

I have been walking twice daily on the closed Stockport branch canal that runs past the school, now a cycle route and full of life (and rubbish) as spring appears. The sky is full of gulls attracted by the ‘recycling’ plants in the area.  I have been researching which species have moved into urban areas and how they perceive climate change.’
Jane Scobie

Images: ©️Jane Scobie






Norfolk
Cromer

🧭COMPASS: Manchester 🧭

Sharing artist reflections from our first week in Manchester at Rogue Studios.

‘I am going to eat the M1. Slurp up the tarmac into my gob and pick the white lines from my teeth with my tongue. 

This image is part of ongoing research into my military upbringing, in which home was always moving and how British culture manifests itself on the motorways and how they in turn inform British culture.’
Emma Illingworth






Norfolk
Cromer