A Westcountry artist has been chosen for a residency in Shanghai by a selection panel including the Hollywood actor George Clooney.

The artist, whose birth-name is Cathy Lapka but is now known as Kitty Von-Sometime, will take up the residency at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in China later this year.

Von-Sometime was born and raised in Exeter but moved to Reykjavik, Iceland, in 2006 after falling in love with the country.

While there she started running her art series The Weird Girls Project, which is a combination of performance, film and photography, using real women rather than actresses or models.

She explained that the focus of the conceptual art project was "releasing women from their personal boundaries with a focus on confidence and body issues".

The project has been gaining international recognition over the past few years, and women are now queuing up to take part in one of the Weird Girls pieces.

"People come from all over and I'm now getting invited to go to other countries. I'm really excited to use new women," the artist said.

It was thanks to her Weird Girls project that she was selected for the residency at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai. The recently opened hotel is also an art gallery and artists' studio space, and counts George Clooney as a member of the committee which chooses artists to live and work there.

As well as beginning the residency in Shanghai in October, Von-Sometime has also been chosen as Converse China's sponsored international artist for 2012. She will travel to China in March and go on a tour around the country producing five pieces in different locations over the country. Local women will appear in each piece, which will be produced by the end of April and released as a series in July.

The artist said that Converse China had chosen to support the project because the process of "letting go" of personal boundaries is a new and appealing concept there.