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Time & space
Explores the relationships and contexts in which artists create and develop work.
Artists and writers unwrap the role that awards, commissions, residencies, prizes and self-generated research and engagement with others can play in providing artists with time and space to develop an artistic framework and critical context for their practice.
Includes Phyllida Shaw's look at charitable trusts, Nina Madden on the Jerwood Foundation, and profiles including Anna Best, Graham Fagen, Shelley Goldsmith, Danny Rolph and Soda, plus first-hand advice from Carey Young on running successful residencies in business settings.
Academic research
The academic world is a formidable resource for visual artists, whether working in performance and live art, design, media, fine art or sound and movement.
It provides a nurturing and stimulating environment for the development of artistic practice and processes through offering a range of fellowships and funded research schemes.
Commissions
Artists have been commissioned to make work for individual clients, organisations and venues for centuries.
Nowadays, there is a wide scope of commission opportunities for artists working in a variety of media and and at all career stages.
Engaged practice
Socially-engaged is a term for an approach to visual arts practice where people and social or environmental contexts and artists' artistic and aesthetic concerns are brought together for mutual examination, exchange and experimentation.
Contexts include include education, healthcare, community programmes and business.
Prizes & awards
The UK boasts hundreds of arts prizes and competitions annually, provided by trusts as well as business sponsors. They may be perceived as attempts to intervene in or influence the commercial art market.
Awarding prizes is also an important way to validate and define the quality of emerging talent.
Residencies
UK and international residencies can give artists time to develop their practice, through personal creative exploration and experimentation.
Clearly though, residency sponsors tend to expect some kind of mutual benefit.
Studios
The term studio has a broad range of definitions, from a space in a group building that is intrinsic to an artist's practice, an arena for exchange, an isolated cell for toil and contemplation or a corner of a flat.
Topic includes material enhancing The studios toolkit, designed especially for artists thinking of setting up workspace facilities and published with Arts Council England support, profiling numerous group studio set ups at different stages of development.
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