Interview with HMP Spring Hill Artist In Residence

Jessica Ostrowicz is Ikon’s Artist in Residence at HMP Spring Hill. James Latunji-Cockbill, Ikon’s Producer, Art in Prisons, interviews the artist about their creative practice.

When did you first become aware of Ikon’s Art in Prisons programme and what made you apply for the residency at HMP Spring Hill?

I was born and raised in Birmingham, and as a kid I always looked to Ikon as my access point to art. I first became aware of Ikon’s Art in Prisons programme towards the end of Dean Kelland’s residency in 2023, while beginning my own journey working at HMP Bullingdon. I was drawn to Ikon’s commitment to long-term, embedded work; an approach that holds together the integrity of the artistic process and the agency of the incarcerated participants. It was clear that this wasn’t about delivering a fixed outcome or imposing a narrative, but about creating the conditions for meaningful, sustained dialogue through making.

The first time I went into the art studio at HMP Grendon in 2024, I had no idea who was a visitor and who was a prisoner. The usual hierarchies and palpable markers of authority that I had become accustomed to at other prisons, dissipated in the space. What struck me was the sense of shared purpose, mutual respect, and creative intent. That experience fundamentally shifted my understanding of what an art space could be within a carceral setting. It wasn’t just a room for making, it was a rare kind of neutral ground; fertile, open, and quietly radical in its ability to allow something else to take root amid an otherwise tightly controlled environment.

There was a real urgency for me in applying for the residency at HMP Spring Hill, both professionally and personally. I really wanted to be a part of a programme that would allow me to be present in a space that I care so much about, to be able to engage with the setting, with prisoners and to be able to respond to it in my own artistic language. It felt like an absolute gift to get to work collaboratively, communally and individually.

In a site like Spring Hill, where movement and transition are central, there’s also huge potential to explore how creative practice can support the negotiation of change. I’m interested in how we might hold space for uncertainty and how art might function, not as a solution, but as a way of being with difficult terrain underfoot. This residency feels like an opportunity to do exactly that, with care and responsiveness.

Your art practice concerns the concept of ‘home’, also the focus for your doctoral research. When considering this in relation to imprisoned people, displacement and exclusion come to mind. How has your previous work in prisons informed this?

My own understanding of home has been shaped by a sense of displacement. As someone with divorced parents and with part of my family heritage rooted in the diaspora, the idea of home has never been a fixed or singular location, but rather something carried, reimagined, and negotiated across time and space. That sensibility informs both my artistic practice and my doctoral research, particularly when thinking about home in relation to imprisonment.

Working in prisons has made the stakes of this inquiry more urgent and more complex. In these environments, the idea of home is often stripped to its barest material and emotional traces. Cells are rarely private and not necessarily safe, and they linger in the precarity of the politics of carceral space, yet they’re sites where people find ways to endure, reflect, and even remake aspects of themselves. I have seen men personalise cell spaces with extraordinary care, fashioning curtains even when there are no windows, creating shelves from drawers, jewellery from deconstructed vapes, colourful pillowcases with jay cloths sewn together with threads pulled from rosary necklaces, and photo displays hung with milk powder. These acts speak not only to survival, but to a deep human impulse to make meaning and claim space, even in conditions of profound restriction.

My work in prisons has sharpened my awareness of how exclusion operates not only through physical removal, but through a denial of belonging. For many incarcerated people, especially those who have been systematically marginalised, the idea of home becomes fractured; sometimes associated with trauma, sometimes with longing, sometimes with hope. In this context, art-making can become a way to reconstruct or rehearse a sense of home: not just as a memory or a place left behind, but as a way of being, a method of grounding or reaching forward.

There’s something really compelling about the way things are made in prison – anything can be repurposed, transformed and reimagined. With the accessibility of things out in the world, this capacity for transformation is often superseded by the ability to click and collect the final product. But whether or not it’s allowed by the prison, and regardless of whether it is art or necessity, there is an innate and beautifully ubiquitous creativity among prisoners. If you look at a bird’s nest, it is intricately woven together, often very strong whilst being incredibly light, and pieced together from the immediate environment. I’ve found nests with the hair of my grandparents woven into it, string, and fibres of fabric. Prisoners build like this — with intricacy and ingenuity from what is available in a confined and limited space.  

These insights continue to inform my approach, not necessarily as an attempt to provide comfort or escape, but as a means of acknowledging complexity, holding contradiction, and asking how home might be reimagined in places designed to negate it.

You tend to collect things – objects, ephemera, prose. What are you intending to collect during a prison residency?

Your ‘bird’ in prison is the time you have to serve. ‘Prison time’ is the strange stretch and contraction of time, the rhythm of waiting and auditory time stamps. During my residency I would like to imagine myself in two states – as a cuckoo bird and as a bird being cuckooed – as I am both the Artist in Residence, and a ‘resident’ choosing to be there and able to leave. The cuckoo’s call is both present and absent; its echo is there, but the bird itself is elusive. It feels like the experience of the incarcerated. These birds are time-keepers and heralders of changing seasons. They also symbolise displacement and the unsettling of established boundaries. Prisoners are placed outside of society, navigating their own forms of exile and their own traumas. Their experiences resonate with the questions that have shaped my artistic practice — of home and un-be-longing, of memory, nostalgia, and of what it means to exist at the edges of systems that seek to define, contain and exclude.

As a starting point, my aim is to collect and replace. Working through layers of translation between my practice and the aforementioned visual prison languages of repurposing and transforming, I plan to collect the sounds of prison: keys, chains, metal doors, boots, observation windows, radio crackles, sirens, ‘A’ locks and ‘B’ locks, airlocks and vehicle gates… These auditory keepers of time are pervasive in prisons and linger in the subconscious minds of the inmates long after release. I would like to find ways of replacing these audios with the sounds of a cuckoo bird, blurring the line between the ordinary sounds of the prison and the symbolic presence of time embodied by the cuckoo.

My first action in HMP Spring Hill however was to make a giant doorstop out of prison soap (a commonly used sculpting material in prisons around the world). I put this in the doorway to the studio, so that every entry to the space could be collected as a chip, wear or scratch.

While working with Ikon, you also have several other international projects this year, with exhibitions in Mexico, Poland and Germany…

Yes, I’ve been blessed with quite a busy year! In June I was part of the 10-year anniversary programme at Kunsthaus Dahlem in Berlin, Zehn Jahre, Zehn Tage, exploring the past, present and future of the museum space. Within this anniversary period, I will be giving a workshop on ‘home as a collaborative act’, an artist talk with curator Philine Pahnke, and exhibiting The Inhale Before, a commissioned solo intervention in the museum. The Inhale Before consists of two pieces of work: Sill (2025), a doorway made from tulip wood and stone, and Threshold (2022-25) 4 cast jesmonite tactile paving tiles. Between these works, I will be examining the immediate future, bringing attention to the next step not just as movement, but as meaning; the moment just within our grasp, and the serenity of lingering consciously within that.

In July, I opened Trwając bez Powrotu (Remaining Without Returning), a solo exhibition at Op Enheim in Wrocław, Poland. The show spans nearly 10 years and will include around 30 artworks, including three large scale installations. One of these three, the Archive of Exhales, is the accumulation of over 1000 hours of intricate working, so it will be really exciting to see it in its entirety.

I’ve also been invited to take part in Common Threads, an international conversation between artists and curators around heritage and original people’s paper and fabric-based crafts. We will be in residence and then exhibiting at Kunsthaus Dahlem in June as a start to this visual conversation, and then going on to a group exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Oaxaca, Mexico, opening in October this year in collaboration with ARENET, The Americas Research Network. This exhibition is also part of Bienalsur, the International Biennial of Contemporary Art of South America, which will then tour Mexico.

While there’s a lot happening externally, I’m grateful to carry that energy back into the prison. Prisons are, in some ways, always in flux — shifting with each new arrival or release. But life inside is also marked by a deep monotony and repetition. This residency is about exchange: creating a dialogue between the inside and outside, and building something that bridges both. At the same time, it offers a rare opportunity to focus on making work within that environment, and that’s something I find genuinely exciting.

Lead image caption: Jessica Ostrowicz, Still from performance Inhale/ Exhale with Dayana Mankovska, for The Inhale Before (2025). Kunsthaus Dahlem. Image courtesy the artist.