Starting the summer of 2017, as part of our festival artist development programmes we delivered The Collective Collaborations project. We brought together three artist-led organisations from across the UK in a peer-learning network focused on developing public-realm installations with our major festivals serving as the platform for their delivery. The project strengthened contemporary collective practice in the UK by sharing best practice, increasing international opportunities and cementing relationships.

Our focus was on areas deemed to be physically at the periphery but ambitious in the scale and spaces they are enabling work to happen in. Led by Curated Place in collaboration with the artist-led organisations, we created opportunities for our resident artists to develop their skills, pursue professional careers and engage new audiences whilst supported by our production and events delivery network.

The project was co-funded by Curated Place, Arts Council England and LeftCoast and Supported by Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Centre, Blackpool & the Fylde College and Aberdeen City Council.

Development

The first leg of the project brought together the 9 artists for the first time to discuss ideas for the project, and further collaboratively develop their practices and concepts for the installations that could be presented at upcoming major light festivals. 'NOMAD' was the final concept developed by the group through their initial brainstorming. Taking the idea of a travelling, they would create nomadic artwork that took parts from the places where they had come from, and parts from the places where they were going to - an audio visual installation that would be projection focussed and site specific, which could be created through ever evolving content and grow to involve new collaborators outside of initial cohort.

Creative Delivery & Engagement

Ahead of the Enlighten Bury Festival in October 2017, the artists set out to work with larger local groups in Bury, allowing participants to influence and create the content for the artwork, giving them a voice through creative expression. The festival homed our artists’ first site specific installation - a 5 min film created accompanied by a soundtrack specifically composed for Bury. The work transformed an old bus stop in the yard of the Transport Museum, allowing audience to join in on a journey through transitioning stories depicted in drawings, photographs, and sound collected by the artists over the duration of the project.

In November 2017 we took the project to Abingdon Studios in Blackpool, where we held an artist and project talk at the Grundy Art Gallery and challenged our artists to create a new site specific installation for a space in Abington Studios - taking parts of Bury and . Artists Stephen C. Nuttall & Lee Crocker worked together on the installation to create large-scale narrative illustrations onto the walls to ‘frame’ the A/V piece. The final leg of the project took us to Aberdeen, Scotland in February 2018 where our artists created another site-specific installation piece as part of NOMAD for Spectra Scotland’s Festival of Light, delivered a collaboration life drawing event as part of public workshops, and featured as part of our panels at the Catalyst Conference.

We worked with many other artists, organisations, businesses and educational centres throughout the project including The Anatomy Rooms (Aberdeen), Aberdeen City Council, The MET Express Drama Group (Bury), The Adult Learning Centre (Bury), Bury Council, Garth Gatrix (Production Manager, Blackpool), Blackpool & Fylde College, James Condon (Animator, Manchester), Calum McCready (Film Maker, Aberdeen), and Mark Jones (Sound Artist, Hull).