Here are the incredible facilitators that will be supporting Hive, with sessions throughout the day.
Taking place at The Carriageworks Theatre in Leeds on Monday 22 May 2023, the conference will ask artist-led spaces, and all those that surround and support them, the question: How do we develop what we do without denying who we are?
Stewardship – Aligning our visions and commitments with wider movements
Joon-Lynn Goh / Anna Colin
If we replaced the word and practice of governance with stewardship, what would we re-remember, reclaim and re-practice? In this session, we aim to shift our understanding of organisational vision and accountability to our social movements, ecosystems and next generations.
Joon-Lynn Goh is a cultural organiser, working with art and infrastructure. She embraces organising as a practice in which migrant and global majority communities are protagonists of change, and where infrastructure, organisation and business are creative experiments in stewardship and worldbuilding.
Find Joon-Lynn: joonlynngoh.net
Anna Colin is an independent curator, educator, researcher, and gardener based in East Kent. Anna is practically and theoretically engaged with critical pedagogy, social practice, alternative modes of instituting, and critical and participatory landscaping.
Find Anna: annacolin.co.uk.
Where do I stand and what do I stand for?
Jane Morrow / Benedetta d’Ettorre
Partner: University of Leeds
The focus for this session is on individual, collective and organisational values: those that you cultivate and communicate, and how they shape our work in the artist-led sector. We will address the significance of reflexivity, productivity, and keeping it creative.
Jane Morrow is a visual art curator, writer, and PhD researcher with a specialism in artist development. She is interested in infrastructure for artists, working across network and production contexts, and through creating formal and informal developmental platforms for practitioners.
Find Jane: janemorrow.com
Benedetta D’Ettorre is a curator, researcher, educator and consultant. She collaborates with arts organisations and artists as a curator and producer. She is interested in researching socially-engaged arts practices, artist-led and autonomous spaces, cultural policy and sustainability by taking multi-disciplinary approaches.
Find Benedetta: Website
What are the conversations we really want to have?
Melissa Burntown / Alice Chandler
Partner: YVAN
This workshop will facilitate critical reflection on the complex state of networks in the arts sector. We will consider themes of value, agency, frustration, solidarity and storytelling in order to think deeper about networks and the stories they contain.
Melissa Burntown is a Leeds-based artist, curator and researcher, whose practice aims to challenge object ontologies and the notion of being-in-the-world from de-anthropocentric perspectives. Working in a variety of media including sculpture, print, text and video; themes of landscape, survival, and ecology often feature in her work.
Find Melissa: @melissa_burntown
Alice Chandler is an artist and postgraduate researcher at the University of Leeds, working across the School of Performance and Cultural Industries (PCI) and the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies (FAHACS). Her research aims to understand the value and impacts of networks for visual artists’ careers and continuing professional development.
Find Alice: alicechandler.com
Finding, running, keeping – How do artists move and develop through their space?
Market Gallery / Chris Biddlecombe and Kirsten Body
Partner: Creative Scotland
How do organisations connect to their communities and embed within their localities? We will take time to reflect on how artist-led projects and spaces respond to needs and demands of the spaces they inhabit, and the responsibilities they have towards their surrounding communities.
Market Gallery is a charitable artist-run organisation facilitated by a rolling committee of artist-programmers, a programme facilitator and a board based in Glasgow’s East End. It was established in 2000 and presents a varied programme of contemporary exhibitions, projects and events, having recently settled in a new space within Many Studios in the Barras.
Find Market Gallery: marketgallery.org
Chris Biddlecombe is a sculptor, a collaborator with artists from other disciplines and a maker of installations in public spaces. Alongside his own creative practice he has developed a number of research, development and networking strategies that have connected various creative communities in the UK and Europe.
Find Chris: artistsunion.scot
Kirsten Body has 20 years experience working in the visual arts sector holding production roles within galleries, public art agencies, local authorities and artist-led projects. Kirsten has a long-standing commitment to supporting emergent visual artists in Scotland and a strong interest in artist-led and self-organising practices. She is a founding member of Circus Artspace – an artist-run initiative and graduate support programme based in Inverness.
Find Kirsten: @circus_artspace
How can we know, show and tell our value?
Dawn Cameron / Emma McDowell
Partner: Centre for Cultural Value
It is often difficult to find space and time to carry out effective evaluation when we are juggling many competing priorities and agendas. Yet embedding evaluation into our practice can provide rich learning and insight into our work. This interactive session will discuss how evaluation can complement and support artistic ambitions.
Dawn Cameron is a project manager and evaluator working primarily in the creative arts, heritage and cultural sectors. She is interested in working on projects which seek to deliver social and cultural change and is driven by an urge to understand what works, how, for whom and under what circumstances.
Find Dawn: armstrongcameron.com
Emma McDowell is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the Centre for Cultural Value, Research Fellow at the University of Leeds, and an Associate Consultant at The Audience Agency. Their PhD thesis, ‘From transaction to enaction: reframing theatre marketing’, explored the processes of participatory sense-making, articulation and communication of cultural value in contemporary theatre-making and marketing practice, in association with HOME, Manchester.
Find Emma: culturalvalue.org.uk
As those who have least to give seem to end up expected to give the most
Jo Verrent / Laura
Partner: Unlimited
How many disabled artists, arts workers and creatives are regularly expected to do something for nothing? In this session, we will explore how organisations of all sizes work together to identify and stop the exploitation of disabled creatives and arts workers (and all other creatives too).
Jo Verrent believes that ‘different’ is delicious not divergent. She works in arts & culture at strategic levels embedding the belief that diversity adds texture, turning policy into real action. Jo is director of Unlimited, with a mission to commission extraordinary work from disabled artists until the whole of the cultural sector does.
Find Jo: Unlimited
Laura is Place Based Officer: North at Unlimited. Within her role, she builds and sustains relationships with organisations and cultural events in the north, sharing best practice, knowledge and signposting to all things access and inclusion. She builds relationships with local artists, ensuring they are linked into our opportunities.
Find Laura: Unlimited
