Greek-Japanese Artist Aya Bundurakis has been announced as this year’s Yeats Thoor Ballylee Artist in Residence. The residency will take place at The Studio at Thoor Ballylee, W.B. Yeats’s summer home near Gort, County Galway from 26 July to 9 August.

Aya Bundurakis is an artist living between the islands of Crete and Corfu. Using her camera as a sensory body enhancer rather than a technological tool, she engages in scientific or tacit knowledge practices, proposing ways to navigate the stress of being a living organism in the technosoil era.

Her own body acts as a specimen of the human experience and a conduit: channeling collective flesh-memory. Images collide and divide according to the situation using the method of mitate. Text, video, drawings and haikus —which act as written photographs — are incorporated.

Bundurakis graduated with an MA in Visual Arts from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and a BA in Graphic Arts Technology from the Technological Educational institute in Athens. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including Fotomuseum Winterthur, Noorderlicht Festival, K-Gold Temporary Gallery, Metronom Gallery, FOMU Antwerp, KM Künstlerhaus, Athens Photo Festival, and has been nominated for awards such as the ING Unseen Talent Award, BBK Award and Prix Virginia.

The residency will include public events, and a creative workshop. Details to be announced via the Yeats Thoor Ballylee Society website and social media.

In advance of the residency, Aya said:

“From the Cuala Press, acting as a blueprint for working models grounded not only in survival, but in autonomy, detail, and tenderness, and pointing towards futural symbiotic modes not yet realized —to the Celtic ecologies that revere water and fish as sacred, and the mystical beliefs of W.B. Yeats, I find that this terrain holds many portals into ancient yet fresh ways of navigating what it means to be human in our time.”

Chair of the Yeats Thoor Ballylee Society Adam Stoneman said:

“We are delighted to welcome Aya Bundurakis as our 2025 artist in residence. Her photographic and research-based work brings together both the distinct ecological context of Thoor Ballylee and the experimental and boundary pushing artistic practices of the Yeats family. In this way, Thoor Ballylee can continue to be a place of ferment for thought-provoking, contemporary art.”

The Yeats Thoor Ballylee Society Artist in Residence Programme is supported by Galway County Council Arts Office.