We are thrilled to announce Marcus Louend as the recipient of the Dance Residency for 2026.
Marcus will be collaborating with Nat Penney and Paige Neis-Beer during this residency.
This is a creative development and presentation platform available to South Australian performing artists working with contemporary culture. The aim of the residency is to offer place and space as part of a vibrant arts community for artists to develop and show new or existing work.
About the artist:
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Marcus Louend is a dancer, performance artist, and choreographer seeking to decentralise their movement and art practice through collective organisation.
Using equitable social models, their ambition is to help educate individuals seeking deeper connection and understanding to movement and its radical potential physically, emotionally, and socially.
Marcus currently works as a tutor and guest performer with Restless Dance Theatre, Australia's leading company working with neurodiverse and disabled artists. This partnership continuously offers the opportunity to inclusively work with the broader community—artists and non-artists—making movement accessible to everyone, and diversifying future practices.
As a mentor, creator, and performer, their work seeks to innovatively dismantle personal, social, structural, and systemic barriers, in order to recalibrate somatic experiences into a sustainable practice.
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Nat Penney (b.1991) is an artist based in Tarntanya (Adelaide).
Combining processes from timber furniture making and metal fabrication with found and formed objects, she considers the sensory desires in things, looking for subconscious object impulses. She’s driven by an obsession and confusion over psychological and emotional states and their reciprocal exchange with our relationships, environments, and the objects we engage with.
Recent works are drawing from experiences of loneliness and how they are shaped not only by absence, but by conditional presence. Looking into the atmosphere of familial domesticity she searches for pleasing points of interconnectedness between the familiar and the eerie; for absurdist moments that engage themselves through futile motion and maybe make you smirk.
Her practice often incorporates materials weighted heavily in nostalgia, such as tiles from her renovated childhood bathroom or her parents’ wooden tennis racquets, embedding personal histories into sculptural objects. These materials act as communicators and carriers of memory, yet memory and nostalgia themselves are malleable, untrustworthy, and sometimes irresponsible, reshaping perception and altering what we take to be truth.
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Paige Neis-Beer (she/her) is an artist and stylist with over seven years of experience in the fashion industry, across London and Kaurna Land.
Her practice spans styling, costume-making and product design. Working between fashion and wearable art, and more recently with silicone as a core medium, her practice draws on the surreal and the strange, fusing the grotesque with the beautiful.
Paige has an ongoing fascination with visceral materials and explores unconventional approaches to making. Her work often explores themes of identity, whether as the observer or the observed.
In February 2025, Paige undertook a 2.5 month residency at Household Gallery, where she collaborated with tattoo artist Hasini Wisna and developed a collection of wearable art pieces that mimic flesh-like forms and second skins. The residency marked a turning point in Paige’s practice, introducing new materials and sculptural processes that now sit at the centre of her work.
Paige is continuously interested and passionate about collaboratively working with artists across different disciplines, to create space for conversation, exchange and connection.
Photo: Courtesy of the artist
This residency has support from
