ARTIST IN RESIDENCE
Our Artist in Residence programme brings a constant flow of fresh ideas and creative energy into Yarn. By offering artists dedicated time and space to develop new work, we create a setting where practice and process can be shared openly, inviting dialogue between artists, our local community and visitors to Ballycastle.
Through our residencies, we aim to inspire curiosity, spark knowledge-sharing and create unique opportunities for learning. Each artist brings their own perspective, connecting local and global threads, and helping Yarn grow as a place where creativity and community meet.
Image: Joan Alexander
Proof of Ghosts; The Postal Darkroom
Artist: Joan Alexander
13 - 19 September 2026
Proof of Ghosts; The Postal Darkroom is a week-long artist residency by Ballycastle-based artist Joan Alexander, exploring photography, absence, grief and ghost stories through making, conversation and participation.
Throughout the residency, visitors are invited into Joan's evolving studio to encounter work in progress, contribute stories of absence and loss at the Ghost Desk, and discover experimental photographic processes using shadow, light and plant pigments. Alongside an opening launch event, the week will include open studio sessions, workshops and hands-on activities, offering opportunities to experience the creative process as it unfolds and engage with the artist’s work.
What this residency is exploring
This residency at Yarn explores photography's ability to help us live with endings and grief more empathetically, drawing on its capacity to navigate the boundaries between light and shadow, presence and absence, and life and death.
The residency provides a space to reimagine 19th-century spirit photography as a contemporary correspondence with loss. Through gathering and developing fieldwork for The Postal Darkroom, it explores the shared qualities of ghost stories and photography, considering how both can help us trace, hold and remain in correspondence with absence.
Spirit photography
Nineteenth-century spirit photography reflected a profound desire to remain in correspondence with loss through its blend of nature, machine, magic and material. While it was eventually overshadowed by commercialisation and spectacle, many of the questions it raised remain deeply relevant today.
Photography continues to evolve and become increasingly commodified. As it becomes entangled with emerging AI grief technologies that promise to simulate the dead into a form of presence, its elemental qualities risk being overlooked before they are fully understood.
Photography as a form of magical thinking and mediumship
Photography is approached here as a form of magical thinking: a way to engage with, work through and explore the magical thinking that can accompany grief and experiences of ghosts.
Many people already correspond with ghosts through felt presence, synchronicity, signs and stories. Psychologists and anthropologists describe this as magical thinking: everyday experiences that may not be underpinned by rational explanation, yet remain deeply meaningful and powerful.
Ghost stories as valuable, everyday traces
Whether they take the form of signs, synchronicities and encounters that are difficult to explain, or stories passed down through families and communities, ghost stories offer embodied and intuitive ways of living with loss. They become valuable traces through which to explore and hold absence, endings and grief.
Image: Joan Alexander
What visitors can expect
Joan will be working in the space throughout the week, writing ghost letters, making shadow-casting collages inspired by
shared stories, and preparing pigments for anthotype sheets.
Visitors are invited to enter the space at scheduled times to experience the work as it unfolds. They will have opportunities to encounter elements of The Postal Darkroom, contribute a ghost story at the Ghost Desk, observe the making of photosensitive plant pigments, and experiment with these processes themselves through drop-in sessions and workshops.
As part of the residency, Joan is collecting ghost stories. These are not limited to traditional ghost sightings or strange encounters, but include experiences that resonate with absence, grief, loss or mystery: synchronicities, signs, felt presence, or a sense of correspondence with someone or something absent — glimpses into something difficult to explain.
Participants are invited to share a ghost story with Joan. She responds by hand in the form of a letter, which is posted to them along with materials to continue the correspondence. Participants are invited to reply, add to or reshape the story before returning it by post, allowing the exchange to unfold over time beyond the residency.
The stories are then processed photographically, beginning with shadow casting and moving into photosensitive plant pigments, with the potential to later incorporate 3D scanning using mobile phones. In doing so, the work brings early photographic processes into dialogue with contemporary AI grief technologies.
Pigments: Joan Alexander
Residency Schedule
Sunday 13 September
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Launch Evening - tickets here
Tuesday 15 September
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Ghost Desk: 11 am–1 pm - book your one-hour slot
Wednesday 16 September
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Ghost Desk: 11 am–1 pm - book your one-hour slot
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Open Studio: 3–5 pm - drop in
Thursday 17 September
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Ghost Desk: 11 am-1 pm - book your one-hour slot
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Plant Pigment & Shadow Casting Workshop: 7-9 pm - free tickets
Friday 18 September
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Ghost Desk: 11 am–1 pm - book your one-hour slot
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Open Studio: 3–5 pm - drop in
Saturday 19 September
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Plant Pigment & Shadow Casting Workshop, 10 am-12 pm - free tickets
Open Studio
Drop in to see the residency as it unfolds. Meet the artist, explore works in progress, ask questions and discover the ideas, experiments and processes developing throughout the week.
Plant Pigment Workshop
Create your own natural plant pigments and explore the early photographic process of anthotypes, using sunlight to produce beautiful botanical prints. Bring a flower or plant that holds meaning for you, or choose from a selection of locally gathered materials. You'll also have the opportunity to experiment with objects, photo negatives or hand-cut shapes to create unique light-based compositions.
Shadow Casting
An evolving participatory artwork exploring light and shadow. Visitors are invited to trace the shadows of themselves, one another or the surrounding space, creating cut-out forms that can be used to cast new shadows or become part of anthotype prints. Depending on the weather, the project may also grow into a collective shadow installation using Yarn's large windows.
Ghost Desk
Book a one-to-one appointment with the artist for an hour of conversation, reflection or creative exchange. Ghost Desk offers a quiet space to share ideas, ask questions or explore your own creative practice in an informal setting. Appointments are available throughout the residency.
Image: Joan Alexander
Image: Joan Alexander
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Joan Alexander is an artist from Omagh now living in Ballycastle with her family. Her work is rooted in shadow catching through experimental and staged photographic works. She has worked and exhibited across the UK, Ireland and beyond, with organisations including Photoworks (UK), Lumen Collective (London) and Performing Arts Forum (St Erme, France). More recently, she has shown with CCA (Derry), Belfast Exposed, Digital Art Studios and PS2 in Belfast.
Joan is currently a practice-based PhD researcher in photography at Belfast School of Art. Her research draws together Shadow Studio, an award-winning shadow theatre project, with Shadow Dial Studies — a series of staged photographic works that trace and map lost time.
Projection, video and darkroom spaces often become mediums through which her work is captured and held. This practice is embedded in understanding photography as a natural process, using materials such as dust, ash and chalk as active subjects. More recently, she has engaged photography as a form of writing with light, working with photosensitive plant pigments and ghost stories.
Proof of Ghosts; The Postal Darkroom reimagines spirit photography through experiences of bereavement, premonitions, damaged dreams and difficult goodbyes. Her research fieldwork explores the traces that connect us to absence but are difficult to hold onto, including ghost stories, starscapes and physical sites of loss.
These ideas form the foundation of her current residency at Yarn, which explores how photography allows us to remain in correspondence with absence rather than simply "moving on". By working with ghost stories, shadows, and sites of loss, she is testing whether it is possible to cultivate a slower, more material, everyday, and empathetic form of grief literacy.