Digital Artist Bursary
In response to the difficult period of physical distancing we all have found ourselves in during the Coronavirus lockdown in 2020 and beyond, we wanted to encourage ways of staying socially connected and increasing solidarity.
We wanted to support artists to generate new ideas, offering seed funding of £500-£1000 for projects which focused on online delivery, and in some cases, a hybrid-model.
We were looking for artists who were finding creative ways to move their practice to digital formats, and who were reaching out to participants feeling isolated.
The most recent bursary has been awarded to filmmaker Matt Kowalczuk and his exciting project Finding Fathers, a multi art form participatory project exploring the impact of fatherlessness. See callout for participants here!
Jessica Starns - Virtual Walks
Using Google Street View as a performance space, Jessica has been inviting participants to take ‘virtual walks’ in places that are important to them or places they would like to visit.
In the past, Jessica has used Google Street View with her grandfather to go on walks around his hometown in Ireland - a place she hasn’t had the opportunity to physically visit.
The work focusses on the process of the walk, capturing the conversations that come out of it, and breaking down the feeling of isolation whilst we are all social distancing.
Image by Nurull Islam
Django Pinter - Four More Walls
What can theatre over the internet do which live-on-stage theatre cannot? It can seamlessly integrate pre-recorded footage with live action; it lets us manipulate audio and video to give exciting and bold visual and musical effects; it creates magic out of actors interacting. Instead of letting social distancing mean a slump for creativity in theatre.
Django worked with actors and creatives to produce an experimental piece of digital, interactive theatre, which was performed online.
Image by Django Pinter
Hussina Raja - Ramadan in Lockdown
Hussina Raja is a British-Kashmiri artist and actress based in London. Her work explores social-political issues surrounding notions of identity, heritage and culture through film, photography and performance.
In engaging and trying to connect with participants during Lockdown, Hussina ended up looking inwards, to her own experience, and created a short film, a conversation that reflected on faith, family and fasting while isolating during COVID-19.
Sita Thomas & Kamal Kaan - Oceans of Blue Sky নীলআকােশরসমু
‘OceansofBlueSky-নীলআকােশরসমু ’is an original audio drama project created by Bengali residents across London responding to lockdown 2020.
Through a series of online storytelling, writing and recording workshops, director Sita Thomas and writer Kamal Kaan collaborated with a group of participants to uncover the process of making an audio drama and to share personal and poetic stories featuring verbatim multi-lingual voices interwoven with poetry and sound design.
Lily Richards -
Community Craft Collective
Lily received the 2019/20 Young Artist Bursary to run workshops in refugee camps in Greece, using ‘rubbish’ to create circus materials and toys. The second half of her project had to be put on hold during the pandemic. We therefore decided that her YAB should go to an online toolkit or manual which has step-by-step guides on how to make items out the waste materials.
The Digital Artist Bursary will help Lily create ‘How to’ videos for these products.
Image by Lily Richards
Image by Ned Wakeley
May Robson & Lily Wakeley - Lockdown Lowdown
The Lockdown Lowdown is an audio-visual diary of life in lockdown which captures the experiences and needs of women caught up in the criminal justice system, who are among those disproportionately affected by the current health, social and economic crisis.
May & Lily will support 10-12 women involved, or at risk of involvement with, the criminal justice system to record - through photographs and voice-recordings - their immediate environments and responses to lockdown. Their contributions will be presented as audio-portraits in an online exhibition.