Dream FM
Artist and Producer (2021)
Commissioned by Manchester Independents
Night falls and metropolis mirrors the cosmos. Destinies connected by light and dust send signals, alone, to one another. The city glitters: On Air.
In August 2021, artists Danielle Swindells and Brit Seaton asked the people of Greater Manchester what they dream of. Directed to the automated voicemail system of fictional radio station Dream FM, members of the public picked up the phone and left their answers.
The sound work What do you dream of? brings together selected hotline musings of the vast metropolitan borough. Strange encounters during sleep, visions of change for a better world and personal tales of love and loss are among a constellation of intimate responses to the question, capturing an audio portrait of dreams spanning from simple and symbolic, to poetic and surreal.
What do you dream of? features an original score by Joshua Inyang and Joshua Tarelle, Space Afrika, which takes sonic cues from pre-digital airwaves, the DIY spirit of pirate radio and musical auras of Greater Manchester’s past and present.
Inspired by the fading format of night-time radio talk shows, Dream FM stages a conceptual transmission which draws on the experience of listening together while apart, the unifying liveness of radio, and the comfort it can bring in the lonely hours when the public, as orator and audience, speaks to itself.
Dream FM is tuned in to emotional connections between strangers across Greater Manchester. The sound work platforms local voices in an experimental piece of archived social history, guided by imagination and the collective sharing of innermost thoughts.
What do you dream of? broadcasted
online at www.dream-fm.com every night at 9:00PM (GMT) from 18 November to 16 December 2021.
A special premiere event (BSL Interpreted) took place at Manchester Central Library on Thursday 18 November.
This project is made possible with support from Manchester Independents.
Artist and Producer (2021)
Commissioned by Manchester Independents
Night falls and metropolis mirrors the cosmos. Destinies connected by light and dust send signals, alone, to one another. The city glitters: On Air.
In August 2021, artists Danielle Swindells and Brit Seaton asked the people of Greater Manchester what they dream of. Directed to the automated voicemail system of fictional radio station Dream FM, members of the public picked up the phone and left their answers.
The sound work What do you dream of? brings together selected hotline musings of the vast metropolitan borough. Strange encounters during sleep, visions of change for a better world and personal tales of love and loss are among a constellation of intimate responses to the question, capturing an audio portrait of dreams spanning from simple and symbolic, to poetic and surreal.
What do you dream of? features an original score by Joshua Inyang and Joshua Tarelle, Space Afrika, which takes sonic cues from pre-digital airwaves, the DIY spirit of pirate radio and musical auras of Greater Manchester’s past and present.
Inspired by the fading format of night-time radio talk shows, Dream FM stages a conceptual transmission which draws on the experience of listening together while apart, the unifying liveness of radio, and the comfort it can bring in the lonely hours when the public, as orator and audience, speaks to itself.
Dream FM is tuned in to emotional connections between strangers across Greater Manchester. The sound work platforms local voices in an experimental piece of archived social history, guided by imagination and the collective sharing of innermost thoughts.
What do you dream of? broadcasted
online at www.dream-fm.com every night at 9:00PM (GMT) from 18 November to 16 December 2021.
A special premiere event (BSL Interpreted) took place at Manchester Central Library on Thursday 18 November.
This project is made possible with support from Manchester Independents.
Vans x MoMA
Curator and Producer (2020)
To celebrate the launch of the Vans x MoMA collection, I was invited to curate and produce a programme of workshops and installations at Vans Covent Garden which created a space for community, art and learning.
The programme was designed to bring a local, contemporary and interactive aspect to the collaboration, through engaging the public (in particular local young people) and commissioning exciting London artists whose practices reflect the ideas and processes of the modern artists featured in the Vans x MoMA collection.
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The programme comprised a series of artist-led creative workshops, each exploring one of the featured MoMA artists’ work from a contemporary perspective and facilitating creative experimentation with materials and artistic concepts, while integrating an art historical context about the MoMA artist into the session.
The accompanying checkerboard installation was designed to showcase the work of three contemporary London-based artists through an immersive audio-visual environment (animated projected artwork and a voiceover by the artist), which delved into the scope of their work, their creative inspiration and processes.
Workshops led by
Jessica El Mal
Nick Kidd
Amy Leung
Jess Nash
Anna FC Smith
& Klaire Doyle
Olivia Twist
Installations by
Liisa Chisholm
Jess Nash
* Due to COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, some of the creative workshops were redesigned to be facilitated through online sessions. The lockdown also meant the third checkerboard piece was unable to be installed.
Curator and Producer (2020)
To celebrate the launch of the Vans x MoMA collection, I was invited to curate and produce a programme of workshops and installations at Vans Covent Garden which created a space for community, art and learning.
The programme was designed to bring a local, contemporary and interactive aspect to the collaboration, through engaging the public (in particular local young people) and commissioning exciting London artists whose practices reflect the ideas and processes of the modern artists featured in the Vans x MoMA collection.
The programme comprised a series of artist-led creative workshops, each exploring one of the featured MoMA artists’ work from a contemporary perspective and facilitating creative experimentation with materials and artistic concepts, while integrating an art historical context about the MoMA artist into the session.
The accompanying checkerboard installation was designed to showcase the work of three contemporary London-based artists through an immersive audio-visual environment (animated projected artwork and a voiceover by the artist), which delved into the scope of their work, their creative inspiration and processes.
Workshops led by
Jessica El Mal
Nick Kidd
Amy Leung
Jess Nash
Anna FC Smith
& Klaire Doyle
Olivia Twist
Installations by
Liisa Chisholm
Jess Nash
* Due to COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, some of the creative workshops were redesigned to be facilitated through online sessions. The lockdown also meant the third checkerboard piece was unable to be installed.
Talk to the Garden
Publication for The Turnpike CIC
Producer & Editor (2022)
Talk to the Garden is a project initiated by artist Frances Disley with The Turnpike CIC that was seeded with a community garden in Leigh, Greater Manchester. This book is an invitation to get to know the plants on our doorsteps and beyond, imagining the voices of the gardens all around us and the ways they call upon us to connect with and befriend their wise and wild inhabitants.
With contributors including Rasheeqa Ahmad, Nicole Rose, Sean Roy Parker and Andrea Ku.
Book designed by Holly Eliza Temple
Publication for The Turnpike CIC
Producer & Editor (2022)
Talk to the Garden is a project initiated by artist Frances Disley with The Turnpike CIC that was seeded with a community garden in Leigh, Greater Manchester. This book is an invitation to get to know the plants on our doorsteps and beyond, imagining the voices of the gardens all around us and the ways they call upon us to connect with and befriend their wise and wild inhabitants.
With contributors including Rasheeqa Ahmad, Nicole Rose, Sean Roy Parker and Andrea Ku.
Book designed by Holly Eliza Temple
Could this be paradise?
Web archive for The Turnpike CIC
Producer (2022)
Visit: www.theturnpike.org.uk
Following the closure of The Turnpike CIC, I was commissioned to produce a web archive which would creatively capture and celebrate the organisation’s activity and learnings.
Could this be paradise? reflects upon the CIC’s five years in Leigh as a bold, independent not-for-profit arts project with community at its heart.
Inspired by Leigh-born Pete Shelley’s Buzzcocks lyric ‘Is this the place that they call paradise?’, the archive channels the DIY spirit and creative energy of The Turnpike CIC’s artists, local communities and audiences through a range of visual, audio and written material.
Web design by Rory Clifford
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Web archive for The Turnpike CIC
Producer (2022)
Visit: www.theturnpike.org.uk
Following the closure of The Turnpike CIC, I was commissioned to produce a web archive which would creatively capture and celebrate the organisation’s activity and learnings.
Could this be paradise? reflects upon the CIC’s five years in Leigh as a bold, independent not-for-profit arts project with community at its heart.
Inspired by Leigh-born Pete Shelley’s Buzzcocks lyric ‘Is this the place that they call paradise?’, the archive channels the DIY spirit and creative energy of The Turnpike CIC’s artists, local communities and audiences through a range of visual, audio and written material.
Web design by Rory Clifford
The year is 1979 and Buzzcocks have just released their third studio LP, A Different Kind of Tension. Leigh-born frontman and punk icon Pete Shelley opens the album with a track that brazenly asks, ‘Is this is the place that they call Paradise?’
Just eight years earlier, the North West town of Leigh had seen the opening of the Turnpike Centre: a bold, Brutalist megalith containing a library and a purpose-built art gallery, which sticks out of the Civic Square like a sore thumb and offers a lifeline to its locals, depending on who you ask.
It was in this concrete heart of the town that The Turnpike CIC tested out a different kind of vision for art in Leigh. Our five years of programming began in 2017 and evolved through the desire to bring high-quality contemporary art to the Turnpike Centre and channel the visionary spirit in the town’s DNA for a new generation of artists, audiences and local communities.
As five years of The Turnpike CIC come to an end, we present this archive to capture our work and reflect on what we’ve discovered along the way. We invite you to explore our findings of what happens when we draw on the skills, creative thinking and DIY courage of artists and communities to collectively imagine: COULD THIS BE PARADISE?
Just eight years earlier, the North West town of Leigh had seen the opening of the Turnpike Centre: a bold, Brutalist megalith containing a library and a purpose-built art gallery, which sticks out of the Civic Square like a sore thumb and offers a lifeline to its locals, depending on who you ask.
It was in this concrete heart of the town that The Turnpike CIC tested out a different kind of vision for art in Leigh. Our five years of programming began in 2017 and evolved through the desire to bring high-quality contemporary art to the Turnpike Centre and channel the visionary spirit in the town’s DNA for a new generation of artists, audiences and local communities.
As five years of The Turnpike CIC come to an end, we present this archive to capture our work and reflect on what we’ve discovered along the way. We invite you to explore our findings of what happens when we draw on the skills, creative thinking and DIY courage of artists and communities to collectively imagine: COULD THIS BE PARADISE?
Activations at The Turnpike CIC
Assistant Producer (2019 - 2021)
Inspired by what we were learning from artists’ processes and community collaboration, the team at The Turnpike CIC embarked on a new direction of programming in June 2019 with the launch of our Activations projects.
Designed to connect artists to communities to test new approaches towards social practice and long-term positive change, the programme became central to The Turnpike CIC's ambitions. Our Activations took an interdisciplinary approach towards connecting the hyper-local to the global, with the goal of generating culture-led ideas for a sustainable and socially just future.
During the first wave of lockdown, and with support from the Arts Council Emergency Response Fund, we commissioned six artists to begin a process of research towards developing ambitious and locally relevant programmes of work that would support our community through a period of recovery.
Upon reopening, The Turnpike brought these projects to fruition, allowing the gallery and the town to become a live testing ground for artistic innovation. Artists worked closely with our communities, supporting local people to develop skills, bonds and confidence to support their resilience. Central themes explored by our Activations included climate change, wellbeing, social justice and the reinvigoration of Leigh’s town centre.
Assistant Producer (2019 - 2021)
Inspired by what we were learning from artists’ processes and community collaboration, the team at The Turnpike CIC embarked on a new direction of programming in June 2019 with the launch of our Activations projects.
Designed to connect artists to communities to test new approaches towards social practice and long-term positive change, the programme became central to The Turnpike CIC's ambitions. Our Activations took an interdisciplinary approach towards connecting the hyper-local to the global, with the goal of generating culture-led ideas for a sustainable and socially just future.
During the first wave of lockdown, and with support from the Arts Council Emergency Response Fund, we commissioned six artists to begin a process of research towards developing ambitious and locally relevant programmes of work that would support our community through a period of recovery.
Upon reopening, The Turnpike brought these projects to fruition, allowing the gallery and the town to become a live testing ground for artistic innovation. Artists worked closely with our communities, supporting local people to develop skills, bonds and confidence to support their resilience. Central themes explored by our Activations included climate change, wellbeing, social justice and the reinvigoration of Leigh’s town centre.
Epic Luxe by Fallen Angels Dance Theatre and Frances Disley