Shallow Waters / The Endless River Of Ink

Dualing Artists

Join us in celebrating the culmination of a three-month artist residency featuring two artists whose practices could not look more different on the surface, yet share a common thread: a deep commitment to finding meaning in the unexpected.

During their time in Manchester, both artists immersed themselves in the local creative community, connecting with fellow artists, exploring the region, and developing new work within The Factory on Willow.

Somewhere between the ancient and the now, Wol-Un is making ink do things it was never supposed to do.

Tamar Sun-Nam Manuel, better known as Wol-Un, is a Seattle-based artist who works in seohwa, the traditional Korean practice of calligraphy and ink painting. He studied it seriously, researched it deeply, and then decided that reverence alone was not enough. His practice lives in the friction between honoring a lineage and refusing to be consumed by it.

At a moment when the world is moving faster than most people can keep up with, Wol-Un is instead... slowing down. His work draws from the quiet iconography of traditional ink landscapes, not out of nostalgia, but out of conviction. Reconnecting to the natural world, he argues, is not a retreat. It is a necessity.

Born to Korean and Filipino parents and raised in the context of diaspora, his art is also a personal excavation. What does it mean to claim a cultural identity from a distance? What survives the crossing from one world into another? These are not abstract questions for Wol-Un. They are the work itself.

Through seoye and sumukhwa, calligraphy and ink painting, he is building something that asks you to slow down long enough to feel it. Come find out what that feels like in person.

There is a fish head sitting in a vase of flowers, and it is somehow the most beautiful thing in the room.

That is the world Darbylyn Dawid lives in. A fine artist and oil painter originally from New England and now based in Brooklyn, Darby has spent her career looking closely at the things most people look away from. Worms. Crustaceans. Fish. The wet, reflective, gloriously unglamorous creatures that exist just outside the edge of what we consider worthy of attention.

She paints them anyway. And she paints them with a level of precision and care that stops people in their tracks.

A 2019 graduate of the School of Visual Arts, Darby was drawn to these subjects first by something purely visual. The way light catches a shrimp. The gloss of a fish scale. The strange luminosity of something that was never meant to be looked at this closely. But the longer you spend with her work, the more you realize that visual pleasure is just the entry point. What she is really doing is asking you to reconsider what deserves your attention, and what you might have been missing all along.

Her work finds harmony in incongruency. Beauty in the overlooked. A kind of quiet argument that nothing is beneath a second look.

Come see what happens when someone refuses to look away.

About the Factory on Willow's Artist In Residency Program

The Factory’s AIR program aims to host up to 6 artists from across the world every year. Selected artists are provided stipends for room & board, food, and art supplies so they can spend their time focusing on their creative practice. At the end of each residency each artist hosts an exhibition in the Factory’s event space and invites the community to join as we celebrate their developing bodies of work.

Learn More About Our AIR Program Here