Arts organisation Metal have announced their latest round of 14 ’Time and Space’ artist residencies. Successful artists are given time to reflect on their practice and development, and are provided with advice and support from Metal’s team of practitioners, fellow artists and producers and are invited to spend time in Metal’s beautiful artists accommodation, free of charge. Metal have three sites across the UK that have benn renovated, transforming historic but under-utilised landmark buildings into vibrant creative and community hubs:-
• In Liverpool, Metal work out of Edge Hill Station, the world’s oldest passenger railway station, which is still in use. The original 1836 Engine House, Boiler Room and Accumulator Tower provide an unusual and stimulating environment for artists to explore.
• Metal’s Peterborough home is Chauffeurs Cottage, the original gatehouse property at the entrance to the impressive Peterborough Cathedral and its grounds. The ancient wall and castle-like gateway remain, forming a sizeable courtyard space. Renovated by Metal in 2011 in partnership with Peterborough City Council Chauffeur’s Cottage provides a welcoming, stimulating, and comfortable space for artists.
• Chalkwell Hall is Metal’s Southend base. It is a four storey, Grade II listed, Georgian building set within the grounds of the well loved and well used, Chalkwell Park. Built in 1830 it has a fantastic position at the brow of a hill, commanding magnificent views of the Park and across the Thames Estuary to Kent and provides a low carbon space for artists-in-residence, events and conversation.
Each of these sites have provided space and time for over 200 artists who have, in turn, gone on to show work all over the world – for example, at the Venice, Istanbul and Whitstable Biennales, LOOP and CTM festivals in Berlin, the Edinburgh Fringe, Women of the World Festival at Southbank Centre, Camden, Brighton, Latitude, Pulse Festival, SPILL festival, Leicester Square, King’s Head and Soho Theatres.
How to Apply
Metal has two deadlines each year for applications to Time and Space residencies – in March and September. For further about how to apply for a Time and Space Residency visit www.metalculture.com
The next deadline for applications is 31 March 2016 .
Successful artists 2015
Pete Cox , a poet and performer, known as the organiser of ‘Pint of Poetry’ at Charters. For his residency, Pete will develop a new full-length spoken word show that stems from his childhood fascination with plastic fangs, forbidden cults, fake blood and generally all things that scared him. Working with fellow poets Mark Grist and Ross Sutherland, Pete will utilise elements of horror and film noir; and puppetry to create a new show to tour to Fantasy, Science Fiction and Horror conventions.
Penny Davenport’ s practice involves making drawings with an automatic and unconsidered approach, never planning or visualizing an outcome. The drawings are an unconscious outpouring of absorbed experiences that are hard to place and lost to meaning, depending on the viewer’s interpretation and conjecture. They often change shape both in tone and content, relying on unpredictable turns and fortuitous twists. The drawing eventually resolves itself. Often there is a narrative or concept, which is later applied by the artist, but not often revealed to the viewer.
Nathan Jones uses a variety of symposia, performance, installation and workshops to make-public artistic research into language, brain and technology. syn-dro.me was a series of new media and performance residencies culminating in the production of the ‘posthuman drama’, The Happy Jug. Nathan is currently Reid cross-disciplinary PhD scholar in English and Media at Royal Holloway University of London, where he is undertaking practice based research into the concept of a ‘Glitch Poetics’. He will spend his residency at Metal’s Liverpool base.
Eloise Moody developed a relationship with Metal following her commission of ‘Breaking Bread’ which was part of their award-winning large scale participatory piece, Harvest. She is now exploring issues around remembrance, commemoration and the interpretation of memory through objects, whether made or found. Using the residency to interview and start conversations with the community of Peterborough she will explore the traces of past lives from the official ceremonies and relics of death, like the funeral and the headstone, to the non-official remainders of a life for sale in a charity shop.
Mary Pearson is an interdisciplinary performance maker currently touring solos The Sand Dog Cometh and FAILURE (& other opportunities for non-linear success), and teaching FAILURE Lab performance workshops. A guest lecturer in Dance at Liverpool Hope University, she has also mentored at Ponderosa P.O.R.C.H. summer school (2011-2013) and is co-curator of Con|VERGE interdisciplinary performance residency (2013-2015) in Germany. Mary has a B.A. in Visual Art and English Literature with Dance (Oberlin College/USA) and studied physical theatre at Kiklos Teatro (Padua/IT). She co-founded Fool’s Proof Theatre, with whom she toured in the UK and USA from 2006-2011.
Harry Sherrif is a writer & director from Southport. He is a graduate of the prestigious Young Writers’ Programme at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool where his play Thank God For The Wheelers received a professional reading. After his first film Doley screened at several festivals and was noticed by Second Light he was awarded mentorship from Film & TV director James Kent (Testament of Youth). In 2014 he was selected as part of the inaugural BFI/Creative England iShorts scheme that gave 20 filmmakers in the UK a £5,000 budget to produce a short film. Hits Like A Girl premiered at Aesthetica Film Festival and has screened at over 20 film festivals. Harry is currently studying a Masters in Creative Writing at the Manchester Writing School and is a Theatre Director in training at HOME Manchester. During the residency he will be working on his next short film and developing a feature film.
Paula Simms is Artistic Director of Zho Visual Theatre, and has been working as a freelance performer/director nationally and internationally for over thirty years. She is also a lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University. For her residency at Metal she will be collaborating with writer Esther Wilson (Unprotected, Ten Tiny Toes, Tony Teardrop). The pair have worked together on many projects including The Quiet Little Englishman.
Paul Trevor – Since abandoning his job as an accountant and picking up a camera at the age of 25, Paul Trevor’s photographs have been widely published in books, magazines, films and tv. A storyteller at heart, photography offered tools which he embraced with enthusiasm. His work was motivated by a keen social impulse. Eager to collaborate with others, he co-founded the Exit Photography Group whose joint projects over a decade produced two documentary books and various exhibitions. His personal projects include the Eastender Archive, which documents over 25 years the changing community of Brick Lane, in the East End of London.
Old Trunk is an emerging, new-writing, Southend based theatre company established in 2012 , the brainchild of Sadie Hasler and Sarah Mayhew. Dedicated to creating strong work for women within an industry that at times does little to represent the female condition, and (sadly, more often) even less to support the female actor, they intend to use their residency to research and develop a new show, deploying other local creatives and inviting the local community to feedback throughout the creative process.
Redhawk Logistica was set up in 2008 by Rob Hewitt as a wide-ranging vehicle to create art work challenging notions of public ownership, authenticity and freedom of expression. Most of the work is made to be experienced in public spaces (frequently in corporatised environments) and designed as part of a city’s culture, rather than being ghettoised as art. Redhawk intend to develop a travelling market stall/arts intervention that will tour some of the UK’s cities and arts events with its own merchandise, in order to create profile for the Redhawk brand and to start dialogue with people about contemporary civic life. Rob hopes to take advantage of Metal’s national network by visiting new cities and considering them as places in which to showcase the resulting work as part of a mini UK tour.
Talia Randall cites her influences as dyslexia, 1980s pop culture and global injustices. Talia is a multidisciplinary Performance Artist based in London, with roots in spoken word. Her work explores speaking the unspeakable; making connections and sharing moments that many find difficult to talk about. These may be earth shattering experiences like loss, grief and conflict or the everyday exchanges. During her residency, she will re-develop her show Bloodlines, originally commissioned by The Roundhouse, which mixes Garage MCing, communist manifestoes and Hulk Hogan speeches, working with set and sound designers.
Steve Ruiz is a Chicago born artist and writer. In his landscape paintings, Steve uses visual storytelling conventions to explore the interaction between narrative, imagination, and a sense of place. He aims to convey the significance which attaches to environments, whether mundane or extreme, when backfilled with memory and animated by stories, seeming set apart and set for action.
Marina Velez is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Cambridge. Her work is concerned with people’s behaviour, how they organise themselves and assign value to things; and how people influence their environment and each other. Marina often works in collaboration, most recently with the Reisner Lab, the Institute of Astronomy and Cosmology, and NANO research at Cambridge University and Philips Research Lab. She is the founder and organiser of the Cambridge Sustainability Residency.
Lydia Fraser Ward is a choreographer and creative producer specialising in creating interdisciplinary work that integrates live performance with digital technology. As Creative Director of outdoor events company Fantasy High Street, she creates performances and installations that interact with audiences using hidden sensors and arduino microcontrollers. Combining these two strands of work, Lydia plans to start work on a new digital dance work called ‘Hi Siri’. This will not only look at incorporating digital projection in response to her choreographic movement work, but will also provide commentary on the role mobile devices and human relation software play in our lives now.
About Metal
Metal was founded in 2002 and has been active in Liverpool since 2004, the South Essex region since 2007 and Peterborough since 2012. Each of our spaces: Edge Hill Station in Liverpool, Chalkwell Hall in Southend and Chauffeurs Cottage in Peterborough were renovated to create centres of activity for artists, creatives and community. From these bases, Metal have worked with artists and local agencies to provide the catalyst that is helping to transform the potential for thriving creative and cultural industries in these three places over the last ten years.
Metal also works directly with artists from overseas and across the UK helping them to research and realise ambitious projects and ideas that take place in a wide variety of contexts within the region. These ideas often respond in a specific way to place and are innovative in content.
We take a developmental approach to local creativity and talent – training, mentoring and supporting the growth of knowledge and capacity in the sector, encouraging cross-sector and cross-disciplinary conversations and sharing of knowledge.
Metal also creates its own projects – large in scale, high in impact and involving a wide number of participants and audience from all walks of life.
Each year Metal works with around 1200 artists from across the world, 18,000 active participants, over 60,000 live audiences and more than 100,000 online audiences.
