DOM

What happens to an artwork after an artist leaves an art residence?

Sometimes it travels back home with the artist. Sometimes it stays in the residence. And sometimes it ends up in a private collection, carrying with it a very particular moment in the artist’s practice – a work made in a specific place, under specific circumstances, and often unlike what the artist was making before or after the residency.

We’ve recently been talking to some of the collectors who chose works by DOM artists after our residencies. Today, we’d like to share three of those works and the stories behind them — why they were chosen and what the collectors see in them.

Our first collector has chosen to remain anonymous. She invited us into her home and showed us three works by artists who took part in our very first residency in 2023.

We asked her a simple question: Why these three?

Here’s what she told us.

Created during his DOM Digital Residency for Personal Structures 2026 European Cultural Centre Italy, Samuel Ferreira’s Watering Can begins with an object encountered and photographed in a cemetery.

Watering Can
2026
Wax, aluminium and coin locker
Approx. 110 × 40 × 25 cm

Suspended from a chain, a wax watering can is connected to the kind of coin locker normally found on supermarket trolleys. Removed from its everyday context and encountered in a cemetery, this familiar mechanism takes on a different meaning.

The wax itself carries another history. Ferreira melts ex-votos — whole figures and body parts traditionally offered as gestures of intercession — and allows their material to re-emerge in another form. What once represented individual bodies, wishes and acts of faith becomes a vessel associated with care.

Watering flowers at a grave is a simple recurring gesture: maintaining something living in the place where someone is no longer physically present. In Ferreira’s work, this relationship between care, absence and memory becomes temporarily accessible through an exchange.

Insert a coin, and the object can be held for a moment.

A familiar transaction becomes a gesture of remembrance.

Created during her one-month DOM Digital Residency for Personal Structures 2026 European Cultural Centre Italy, Martyna Rzepecka’s Martyna Rzepecka The Moult (Wylinka) emerges from an intensely physical process of carving.

The Moult (Wylinka)
2026
Graphic installation
Linoleum, graphic matrix
175 × 85 cm

For a month, Rzepecka worked directly on a large sheet of linoleum — sitting, lying and moving across its surface in order to carve it. Through this repeated contact, the boundary between her own skin and what she calls the “graphic skin” of the matrix gradually began to dissolve.

Rather than treating the matrix as a stage on the way towards a print, Rzepecka allows it to remain an autonomous object. Cutting becomes a process of removal: the surface is marked, wounded and transformed until the matrix itself resembles a shed skin.

The work also carries the conditions under which it was made. Created while Rzepecka’s studio was continuously streamed, an initially unfamiliar experience of being watched gradually disappeared into the physical rhythm of working.

Now travelling to Venice, The Moult moves from a process observed through a screen to an object intended to be touched. Viewers will encounter its grooves, textures and openings through their own bodies — transforming a remote visual experience into a haptic one.

A skin formed through touch, and returned to touch.

Created for Personal Structures 2026 in Venice, Trần Quang Đại’s A Box arrives exactly as it travelled: sealed, labelled, taped and marked by its journey from London.

Inside are the materials of A Year, Đại’s graduation installation from the Royal College of Art: receipts collected over twelve months and 365 metal pins, each marking a day. Together, they form a self-portrait through ordinary acts of living — meals, transport, medicine, groceries, places and exchanges.

For Venice, the materials remain sealed. The audience knows what is inside without being able to see it. Knowledge replaces inspection; trust replaces proof.

The work draws attention to the systems an artwork passes through before entering public view — packing, customs, storage, documentation, borders and institutional permission. What normally disappears once a work is installed remains visible.

Placed inside the larger shipping container of Personal Structures 2026 European Cultural Centre Italy, the structure becomes almost literal: a year inside a box, a box inside a container.

The architecture of transport becomes the architecture of exhibition.