A residency looking at the slow closure of a victorian asylum.

During the five day symposium, Glassball Studio artists and attendees engaged in discussion around making artwork with people and place, and how we can capture, if at all, the collaborative process.

The colour of the water, the distortion of Alison’s image, the act of looking up through the quick pace of the peaty boundary stream. Alison’s turquoise painted nails disturb the water, letting it slowly drip from her fingers back into the stream. The sound as the mic is submerged, the rushing like noises as Alison moves through the water. Alison Lloyd wanted to see what the stream would witness, as Alison moved along it to mark this watery boundary. The moving image piece is the result our collaboration with Alison during her micro-commission for …

Invited by Jim Grevatte, Curator, to bring our collaborative practice to Ruddington and create temporary public artworks, activities and interventions with residents and artists, whilst the museum is undergoing a major transformation.

The Coming Community: New Towns, Art and Place explores the potential for art in new and expanding communities. By exploring legacies of art and culture in the first generation of new towns, we consider what might be learned from such examples. The symposium interrogates contemporary practices and understandings of placemaking from a civic perspective, and how they can be applied responsibly in 21st century new towns.

A temporary exhibition space at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool, showing work in development. 

‘The Spar is offering 3p off Swiss rolls, and the 44D bus to the Pier Head declares, in livery approaching the psychedelic, that Skelmersdale New Town is ‘a good place to live’. Saplings stand in their wire cages as children walk and skip through the geometric newness of it all, and I can almost smell the fresh paint and broken earth and planed timber and putty. I’m familiar with all of this, even though I’m looking at it now from a long way off. I’ve never lived here, but this is an intimate form of time travel. It feels like going home.’
Extracts from ‘Planet Skem’ by Paul Farley, Writer & Broadcaster.

ILLUME was a three year collaborative public art project, in Skelmersdale, Lancashire.

Images from the Skelmersdale: A New Town project were installed in the PR1 gallery, Preston.

Journeyer is the title of our commission for Essex County Council | Place Services, to deliver an innovative public arts project in Harwich, Essex.

Temporary light installation, Harwich.

How long does it take for a town to become a community, how many generations of families does it take to create a place?
Please the view the project website at picturenewtown.org.

Two mixed live recordings made inside Peak Cavern: of Drums being played to the rhythm of the second, and unique, recording from the annual natural event of water entering the cavern after heavy rainfall, culminating in an audio sound that describes the caverns alternative name, ‘the Devils Arse’. Sound recordings: Printz Holman, Drums: John Thorn

Living Gallery started out as an idea of how Glassball could work with those living within the Hanley East area of Stoke-on-Trent during a period of change. We worked in the area for just over three years as the project evolved alongside the physical and very personal transitions taking place.