yep, it’s update night at the first creative coast of 2010 with news and opportunities from the north yorkshire creative network and on local projects. essential if you want to know what’s going on and how you might get developed or commissioned (courtesy of a new scheme offered by the north yorks network). rick of chrysalis arts and wendy of create will be spilling the beans. it’ll be nice to be back at the merchant too. 5.30pm. link to creative coast facebook group.
it looks our public art collaboration with rachel welford and john clarke will be installed w/c 8th february. you can see progress of the project over at www.railwayart.com
rachel and i presented the project to students on the school’s creative and media diploma at the start of the year which prompted some good questions. the students are in process of delivering a project about documenting sense of place so there was lots in common with our piece.
[note to self - must blog about the diploma soon...]
a Q&A session at the york ‘cultural evolution’ symposium this week brought up the issue of creative businesses taking on work placements.
a young creative asked how he could get some real world experience and a business owner replied that it was common to work 8am-11pm as it is and would really struggle to take on placements. that tends to be the common excuse. but i disagree and i think small creative businesses who think like this are losing out.
i think it helps for both parties to understand the ‘arrangement’ of placements. i confess we’ve never actually explained our expectations to any placement assuming they ‘get it’ already, but here’s how i think it pans out…
we needed to quickly knock up some flyers for creative coast which kicks off again next week after a bit of a break and couldn’t resist this pun.
ironically all the effort into enterprising britain [2009 brochure here featuring scarborough] combined with a very busy 6 months for us and create meant that some of the things that won us the award have slipped – hence the almost absence of creative coast this year. but despite being quiet we have been busy behind the scenes making links and securing a little funding that will enable us to hook up with networks across yorkshire, sharing good practice and looking for opportunities.
the first of these is an evening with steve ding of bmedi@ in november, we’ll be sending a posse over to bradford in 2010 and hopefully get some kind of networking event sorted too. we have hook-ups with creative, IT & digital york for 2010 in the planning stages as well as having our sights on leeds and hull too. looks busy – we’re definitely spurred on by the two enterprise awards and looking forward to sharing our story. our ‘roadshow’ approach is also something of a pilot scheme that might be rolled out to other sectors with creative coast training organisations and businesses in scarborough how to get out there and share their story.
we’re also continuing what we hope are useful training/taster events, the first being ‘twitter night’ next thursday plus we’ll be bringing the creative sector on board with the CHART Scarborough project via a fun mobile phone treasure hunt in the dark. if you haven’t got hold of a flyer you can click on the second image above to view it large enough to read the text. looking forward to seeing folks on thursday.
beverley literature festival begins today with a splendid line-up including will self, iain banks and a l kennedy.
this is the second year we’ve designed the brochure and posters for the festival [and some rather colourful stands seen around libraries in the region]. having introduced a new beverley-centered visual style for the festival in 2008, our approach this year has been about establishing the brand with a continuation of the look including efforts to ensure the brochure remains as intuitive as possible to navigate and use. there’s the addition of a children’s festival weekend this year which has its own pull-out mini brochure along with the booking form which doesn’t destroy the brochure when used.
we’re proud to have been asked to be one of the tours at the north yorkshire cultural conference tomorrow. we’re billed thus…
‘the tiny gallery with a big heart would like to welcome you to view it’s gallery and discuss some of the exciting projects that are coming out of it. Adrian Riley will describe their journey as a design studio, to opening up their shop window, to some of their current work, such as CHART Scarborough and public art on the old Scarborough-Whitby railway line. They also run creative coast, a grass roots network for creative on the North Yorkshire Coast.
so a big hello to those who will be visiting us tomorrow. all three of us will be at the morning conference too so if you know who we are do come and say hello. which reminds me, we must put some more up to date photos of us on here. where’s that ‘to do’ list?
btw, there’s still time to book for the morning (and maybe some of the tours) and join 100+ delegates from across the county.
the new exhibition in our tiny gallery will be bridge – photographs by graham rhodes.
it’s daunting to begin to introduce graham, depending on whether that day he is exhibiting paintings, MC-ing a concert, acting as a ghost pirate, or as was our experience recently, collaborating as a storywriter on a comic. if you own the police’s early singles you’ll also have seen graham’s graphic design work. for our exhibition he is a photographer – something that graham has taken up quite recently and with some wonderful results. we love his good-affordable-art philosophy and the framed one-off prints in this exhibition will all be for sale at £40 each.
if i remember right [and conversations with graham can go off at deliciously wild tangents], the idea for the exhibition came from us chatting about producing some high quality scarborough artist’s postcards to be launched at an exhibition in our gallery. well, the postcards haven’t quite happened yet – next summer perhaps – but graham did hint that he’d love to take a series of photos of the iconic spa footbridge which is part of the view from our gallery/studio window. so we thought ‘why not’? and here we are.
the exhibition opens on monday with a private view this friday at 5pm. do get in touch if you’d like an invitation sending. we liked the idea of giving a photograph as the invitation, so one windy day 2 weeks ago graham photographed a printed invited tied to the bridge [below].
we tweeted it a few weeks ago, but are delighted to formally anounce that we have been awarded the contract in a competitive pitch to design the printed and web-based version of CHART Scarborough (formerly known as Scarborough Arts Trail). the first step has been to create a blog that will document the process as we carry out research and undertake trials with people using different methods of navigating scarborough’s cultural hotspots: www.chartscarborough.com
expect us going on off all sorts of cartography tangents on there. but we’ll pop the odd post on here as we reach milestones in the project. we’ve already come up with the name with project leader, dorcas taylor, and really looking forward to working on the rest of this project.
…will be the area shown below.
we’re pleased to announce that we will be working artist rachel welford to provide a piece of public art on the old scarborough-whitby railway line, now part of the national cycle route and an increasingly used alternative transport route into urban scarborough.
the artwork will form part of a new track surface near the road bridge at the bottom of woodland ravine in scarborough at the intersection of several routes. the work’s function is to act as a waymarker and signpost and will be visible to users of the line and by pedestrians and vehicles from the road bridge. adrian and rachel [taking a snap on the pic below] produced the winning design in a competitive submission with rebecca providing some vital technical insight to bring the idea to fruition.
the project will involve local community groups who use the track working with poet john clarke to generate text for the artwork. this project will be something of a new venture for us and we hope, lead to us applying for similar work in the future. we’ll blog progress on here as it develops. workshops with the community groups should begin in the next couple of weeks with completion of the project in october of this year.
some links:
friends of the old railway line
the cinder track – a project by university of sheffield students. summary of the cinder track project in this issue of renaissance news.
sustrans
i thought i should report back on the downing street visit – it was quite an experience, and having had time to reflect a few things still stand out:
surrealism: steve and i were ushered into a side room on arrival – privileged to be part of a select group of 5 out of the 150 present who had been invited to personally meet the prime minister and lord mandelson. (a blue sticker on your name badge indicated your special status) i remember turning to steve and admitting i was finding this all a bit surreal. he concurred. i have to admit it felt quite good to follow the PM out into the main rooms with everyone looking and rushing to shake his hand. we played it cool scarborough, we played it cool.
charisma: everyone asks what the prime minister is really like. as you might have heard elsewhere he is surprisingly charismatic, affable and witty in real life. his speech was delivered without notes and peppered with a couple of jokes about recession – perhaps a tad risky in a room full of small business owners but those assembled seemed to appreciate his honesty. he came across very well – the tv cameras really do hate him.
rush: it was also clear though that his life is probably planned to the second, with his arrival imminent we had to down glasses and (quickly! and in the right order!) line up ready and waiting. and he was ushered away immediately after his speech to vote in the new speaker of the house. it was clear that any hopes of actually having a conversation with him were a tad naive – our meeting was a handshake, thanks for what we were doing and small talk as we were photographed. but by the time the speech was under way steve and i were happily loitering at the back, glowing slightly and enjoying a glass of wine thinking what the heck – how many people get personally thanked by the PM?
message: but before it sounds like we just went down and attempted to drink some of our taxes back, be assured that we did make some serious effort getting scarborough’s message across to government ministers and staff. what was a real surprise was how genuinely nice the government people were and how much they knew about us. several people – including rosie winterton, minister for regional economic development and minister for yorkshire who recognised us from across the room – made an effort to come up and say how impressed they were with scarborough winning with european enterprise awards. we were made to feel rather special and certainly felt very proud to be representing the town.
art: after chatting with some other entrepreneurs (all equally bemused at their invitation) and after speaking to journalists we then wandered around looking at the state rooms and the art on the walls. an interesting mix – there’s a whole other blog post on that topic to come i suspect.
after: we did the obligatory posing for a photo in front of the iconic door and then steve and i went for a couple of pints opposite the houses of parliament and reflected on the evening. strangely i think my overriding memory of the evening will be the arriving. having to turn up without an invitation when everybody else had one (just say your name on the gate, they said), going through the security check and then being left to wander up downing street to the door of number 10 keeping a careful eye on the policeman with the machine gun just in case i looked as out of place as i felt. it was a bit like walking through the other side of a mirror.
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