WORK: selected artists

We’re pleased to announce the artists, selected from an open call, for WORK, a two year programme in which they’ll be supported to develop, produce and exhibit films made in collaborative contexts. Each of the four artists will be working with Animate and one of our Midlands partners, exploring ideas and the realities of what ‘work’ means for the ways we live today, engaging directly with the experiences of contemporary working lives.

Our partners are: Fermynwoods Contemporary Art, Thrapston; Junction Arts, Chesterfield; Vivid Projects, Birmingham; and QUAD, Derby.

Dryden Goodwin, working with QUAD, is considering how the rhythms of a person’s working life defines and shapes them, in the context of home care health working.

Jenny Holt, working with Fermynwoods Contemporary Art, is investigating the tensions between a historically rural, farming community and its recent development as a site for internationally-networked distribution hubs, creating visual, economic, social and cultural transformations of place.

Adam Lewis-Jacob will be working with Vivid Projects, taking the Trade Union Resource Centre archive as his starting point, devising methods of shared authorship to explore contemporary issues affecting workers’ rights.

Esther Johnson, working with Junction Arts, is exploring ways for film to tell individual stories of the impact of economic changes brought from post-industrialisation in Bolsover.

The artists have embarked on a research and development period, and throughout the WORK programme, we will be documenting their different approaches experiences in creating artist’s film projects in collaboration.

The development phase is supported using public funding by Arts Council England. Jerwood Charitable Foundation has made a generous commitment to support WORK, conditional on our securing the necessary additional funding.