Creative Collaborations

Creative methods have been central to our practice. We worked with local artists in each place, and they supported our community engagement and the development of our creative methods. These artists also allowed us to co-produce work with communities and ensured that we could share the findings of our research with the people that contributed to it.

Michelle Rumney’s installation, titled The Ragged Map, was displayed in the Royal Arcade in November and December 2021. Inspired by other people’s ‘best bits’ of Boscombe, The Ragged Map was created by playing a game walking the streets, both in person and online via Street View. In the Towns and the Cultural Economies of Recovery workshops, people who’d never met before started sharing their own stories about these places with each other—stories of people making a difference within Boscombe’s local communities. Michelle asked people to doodle their own maps of two places they’d heard about during the workshops—from the (temporary) refugee welcome and meet-up at San Remo Towers to the Secret Garden to ‘The Sea, The Sea’.

In Towns and the Cultural Economies of Recovery, Darlington participants worked with words and doodles to create miniature books—from which the the self-identified disabled writer, activist and creative practitioner Lisette Auton devised a poetic and lyrical essay. Details, images and artefacts were produced from the workshops, and Lisette Auton’s poem Darlo Matters was exhibited at the Darlington Hippodrome and at Darlington Railway Station from early November until the end of 2021.

On October 23rd 2021, Toni Cook, a community theatre practitioner, and young people from Point of View took-over the Powerhouse in the Maylord Centre, Hereford. They read poetic works that had been created in response to a Towns and the Cultural Economies of Recovery online workshop, discussed young people’s views of Hereford, and the changes that they feel are needed for the future of the city.

What is the value of artists? Who is deciding this value? How do these conversations change local culture in Southend? In June 2021, Towns and the Cultural Economies of Recovery asked artists Emma Edmondson and Lu Williams to host ‘The Southend Salty Pub Quiz’, compiling their experience of public art projects, proposals, pokes and prods from councillors, consultants and commissioners. They invited the public and those with institutional power to take part and the video What Makes Good Public Art? was produced from their answers.

For Neighbouring Data, the sound artist Hannah Kemp-Welch produced an audio-visual piece illustrating different visions of Sandown’s future that used coloured text and field recordings based on community consultation responses. In Spring 2023, Sandown residents were asked about what they thought the town might be like in a hundred years’ time. As a socially-engaged artist, Hannah presents the written responses in overlapping categories, illustrated with processed recordings from the area and other sounds that bring their visions to life. Feeling Towns, in collaboration with officers at the Isle of Wight Council, had explored the meaning and value of place, regeneration and the economy in the town.

In the Neighbouring Data practitioner workshop, the writer and artist Kabe Wilson produced five satirical online newspaper articles that responded to a fictional government initiative for twinning together towns in the UK . Based on Feeling Towns research, the articles span a period of one year, from the initiative’s first discussion in Parliament to the anniversary of the first ‘Darlington-to-Dorchester’ festival. These five identifiable caricatures of UK newspapers cover different points on the political spectrum and tensions between national and local press, showing the issues raised by disseminating place-based art.