We have had a very difficult few weeks lately, deciding on which artists to award our Pentagon micro commissions to. We were very excited to receive a large number of extremely good submissions, which made the decision process almost unbearable as we had to say ‘no’ to many project proposals that we absolutely loved. The decisions, however, have been made and we are delighted to announce that the following projects and artists have been awarded the inaugural Pentagon Micro Commissions 2015:
Megan Clark-Bagnall ‘Needle in the Haystack’
Carrie Love ‘Take me to your Hero’
Shiva Page ‘Automata Sculpture’
Carrie Love and Ali Brown ‘How to build a community’
Elizabeth Jane Lovely ‘The treasure chest of the treasured and the cherished’
We are very much looking forward to working with the artists over the next few months and producing their projects in the autumn. We will keep you up to date with how we are getting on. We will also be looking for some volunteer artists to work alongside the commission winners, so if you have some spare time and would like to gain experience in socially engaged public art, do get in touch!
We also can’t wait for our first co|Create International Residency on August 4 th& 5 th, led by Darren O’Donnell, the founder of the Canadian company Mammalian Diving Reflex. Highly participatory and interactive, the workshop will take participants through a process that will give them tools and insights to produce high quality socially engaged art interventions, based on Mammalian’s methodology of Social Acupuncture. Our five commission winners will be taking their places alongside artists from a variety of backgrounds and a scattering of Creativity Works staff as well! This is a real first for us and something we are very proud of as we endeavour to stay at the forefront of socially engaged arts practice. There are still a few remaining places left so do hurry to grab one before it’s too late.Finally, Creativity Works staff and trustees came together in Larkhall recently for our annual away-day, alongside our primary funder, Arts Council England. Our focus this year emerged as ‘quality’ not ‘quantity’, really embedding our award-winning and proven working practice into all aspects of our organisation, seeking new ways of articulating our impact and looking at innovative ways to tell our story and those of our participants and artists. I am sure much will come from the day that will see us taking ever-larger strides forward in all the work that we do.
