Wanted Items Please for Community Group

Making Surrey seeks to deliver a high quality programme of new craft-making across 9 boroughs of the county. Its aim is to employ 3 highly skilled makers to act as animateurs in 3 communities each, as well as inviting a renowned international practitioner to lead a central residency. The intention of this is to enable more people locally to take part in a quality arts experience over a 12 month period, during which time it is intended to foster creative networks across the county, with a view to establishing sustainable models of practice once the project has finished. Its ambition is to be, above all else, a dynamic and innovative arts project, but one with the capacity to engage widely with individuals and communities.>>

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Making Surrey aspires to use crafts as a way of empowering local people to make a series of creative responses to their sense of place and identity, to embed the arts into the key questions and debates concerning local communities, and to place the work at the heart of what it means to be living and working in Surrey in the 21^st century.>>

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In addition we shall seek to identify 3 local artists, who will each be mentored by one of the lead artists, with a view to developing their skills as practitioners and to invest in the future sustainability and infrastructure of craft in the county. In so doing we aim to engage strongly with the themes and priorities set out in the Local Area Agreement as articulated in Surrey County Council’s Strategic Partnership: A Vision for 2020.>>

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We envisage a series of conversations, therefore, between artists and participants, between different generations of residents, local people and policy makers, and between practitioners themselves, as the project unfolds in its central ambition of making lace>Surreylace>.>>

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The project will lead to a series of both local community-based exhibitions and county-wide events, highlighting both the local distinctiveness of each of the 9 boroughs’ particular contributions and the wider county impact that the project will offer in its response to the Surrey Strategic Partnership. This might incorporate a travelling exhibition, a film, input into the county’s growing festival programme, a publication. The precise outputs will be negotiated locally between artist and participants, then collated centrally, in order to ensure that what