Earlier this year we sought nominations from studios, programmers and practitioners across the North of England to find sculptors, writers and those with cross-disciplinary practices to participate in a collaborative selection process. We invited 20 artists and writers to take part with a small honorarium to acknowledge everyone’s time, and asked them over three weeks to check out each other’s work, strike up conversations where there were resonances, and should something come to the fore – make a proposal for a collaborative text.
The idea was to design a process that would be worthwhile for everyone, even those who weren’t eventually commissioned, and at the very least would introduce artists to artists who might never otherwise meet. We’ve discovered many practitioners across the whole region that we didn’t know about and it was a privilege to read all the proposals.
This is part of our experimentation into different ways of commissioning, in an attempt to do something other than callouts, shortlists and necessarily offering more rejection than good news. Lazy Liaisons was one of these experiments, and will go towards a publication to be announced later this year.
The Lazy Liaisons cohort of participants are:
Norman Payne, Anna FC Smith, Niloo Sharifi, Chester Tenneson, Shonagh Short, Lily Lavorato, Bethany Stead, Sarah Pennington, Tao Lashley-Burnley, Francisca Onumah, Juliet Davis-Dufayard, Amelia Wood, Anisa Nuh-Ali, Kerry Tenbey, Jamie Holman, Claye Bowler, K Walker, Charlotte Cullen, Yvonne Baines, Josh Hart
The collaborative texts that we have commissioned will be by:
Bethany Stead & Amelia Wood
Kerry Tenbey & Anna FC Smith
Shonagh Short & Norman Payne
Niloo Sharifi & Josh Hart
That’s all we can say for now, but watch this space!