Ptarmigan operated in Tallinn from 2011-2014. We no longer maintain any presence in Tallinn, but this website will continue to serve as an archive of the activities produced at Ptarmigan during these years.
We're pleased to have our good friend Hannah Harkes officially join the team, where she will be Director of Creative Hemispheres the IInd. Hannah will be reponsible for all Ptarmigan activities during the gap between the end of Andrew Paterson's residency and the start of our yet-unscheduled Summer 2014 madness.
Hannah Harkes is a Scottish artist currently based in Tallinn, Her work sits in the interstice of slapstick and sincerity; where play meets morbidity and temptation meets repulsion. The drawn mark informs her practice, as does language and forcibly changed context. On the question of the viewer's position, she is becoming increasingly interested in who the player is.
And the standard bio: After graduating from Gray's School of Art in 2011 with a BA(Hons) in Fine Art Printmaking, Hannah became resident at Polymer Culture Factory in Tallinn, where she mainly made video works from the depths of an existential crisis. She returned to Scotland to do a drawing/durational action exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh then moved to Finland where she worked for some time at the Nelimarkka Museum in the middle of nowhere, resuscitating the dusty stone lithography facilities and making comics. She was invited as resident artist to the Novia Fine Art school in Jakobstad, Finland, where she formed an art school band and released one cross-genre album before disbanding and returning to Estonia, to co-run Grafodroom printmaking workshop and artists' studios in Tallinn's old town. From this spot she is now working on video games, audio games, comic books, upcycled contraceptives and sometimes prints.
At Ptarmigan, Hannah plans, in collaboration with others, a handful of events that are connected perhaps only by the desire to encourage people to do things together and also to do things with things that don't do the things that those things usually do.
We've worked closely with Hannah for over two years, through various events in both cities and at Tiib, and love her incredibly. With her energy we will hopefully survive the darkest and coldest part of this winter.