Introducing Elena Jackson
We are happy to announce that Elena Jackson will be joining our Board Members as part of In-Situ.
Elena Jackson is a Curator and Producer. She is the Co-Founder of art and culture company, Deco Publique and Director of the National Festival of Making Community Interest Company. Through their work in the North, Deco Publique works towards creating cultural infrastructure that supports the development of place specific cultural ecology. Elena works with artists, industry and communities to create mass and intimate festival experiences and original art commissions that are rooted in people and place.
Through her work with the National Festival of Making, Elena curates the commissioning programme, Art in Manufacturing, placing 26 artists in residence with industry in Lancashire to date. In 2013 she co-founded Morecambe’s Vintage by the Sea Festival and recently co-produced five heritage landscape artworks around the Morecambe Bay coastline including two permanent sculptures, SHIP and Horizon Line Chamber. Elena is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Board Director of In-Situ.
She is based and lives by the sea in Morecambe.
Introducing Jane Lawson
We are happy to announce that Jane Lawson will be joining our Board Members as part of In-Situ.
Jane Lawson is an artist based in Manchester whose practice focusses on why things are the way they are and how they could be different. She is also Artist Development Co-ordinator at Castlefield Gallery, where she set up the Castlefield Gallery Associates programme in 2012, shortly after graduating from the Salford University Visual Arts BA. Previous to this Jane was a knitwear designer, a founder member of radical art and design collective UHC, a co-organiser of the first three UK Climate Camps and a researcher into corporate ethics for Ethical Consumer magazine.
Jane was an In-Situ In Residence artist in 2013, when she made the Brierfield Timeline, and also participated in 2016 In-Situ Crash residency. In 2018, as part of the exhibition The Ground Beneath Your Feet at Castlefield Gallery (Manchester), Jane initiated a UK branch of the Radical Mycology network. She has hosted two Radical Mycology Gatherings (Hulme Community Garden Centre, Manchester, 2018; and Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool, 2019, with Feral Practice, as part of Jade Montserrat’s exhibition Instituting Care).
Exhibitions and projects include This Land Is Our Land (Paper Gallery, Manchester); Mushlove (Mulino, Oregon, as part of the 2018 Radical Mycology Convergence); BiblioTEch (Portico Library, Manchester); Cultivate: 7500 Stories (198 Gallery, London); Start Where You Are: Second Degree Potentias (Bloc Projects, Sheffield); Emergency (Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth); Press Room (Creative Time Summit at the Venice Biennale); Show Me The Money (NGCA, Sunderland; John Hansard Gallery, Southampton; People's History Museum); Small Change (AirSpace Gallery, Stoke). She has run workshops for NESTA, the Social Art Summit (Sheffield), the Incidental Unit (Manchester Art Gallery) and the People’s Bureau, and is an alumna of School of the Damned
Introducing Isabella Martin
We are delighted to now announce that artist Isabella Martin will be the next artist to work on a residency as part of The Gatherings.
Over the course of the next 12 months, with a flexible timescale allowing for the current situation, Isabella will be exploring the Pendle landscape and learning about the heritage of its drystone walls and hedges. These borders are also places, revealing the geology of what’s under our feet and giving homes to whole ecosystems. Traditional boundaries define and shape our image and experience of the countryside. Along the way she will be working with rurally based partners, practitioners and communities based around the footprint of Pendle Hill.
Isabella Martin is a visual artist who works with people and places, exploring how we fit in the world and relate to our surroundings. Her work moves between mediums and is context specific; driven by interdisciplinary collaboration, in-depth research and experimental play.
To find out more about Isabella and the project click here
OPPORTUNITY: The Summit artist brief
The Summit
Radical thinking and making with young people
Timescale: 6-month project 2020/ 2021 (flexible timeline from Sept 2020 to Feb 2021) Deadline: 30th May 2020 Interview date: to be conducted online on the 15th June 2020
We are looking for an artist, artist collective or arts organisation that has experience of working with young people, to design and deliver an inspiring program of activity and co-produce an artwork, event or performance with a group of young people aged 12-16 in Pendle.
The artist(s) will lead weekly sessions with a group of young people to devise and develop ideas for an artwork, performance or event based on the project brief. This project will be young people led and the artist(s) will support them in developing their ideas and interests in a creative way relating to the project brief. This brief is open to artists working in any medium.
The Summit will explore what it means to be radical today, looking at topics ranging from, but not limited to, peaceful protest, creative activism & climate change as well as global and local issues. Through this project young people will have the opportunity to explore issues that matter to them through collaborations with artists, creative practitioners & organisations. The project is inspired by a history of radical thinkers and activists from the local area, bringing a focus to what it means to be radical in 2020. The Summit will give young people a new understanding of local history, a reinforced sense of local identity and new pride in where they live. It will give them the knowledge, skills and agency to develop their own ideas through creative processes.
Download brief and details of how to apply here