Note - images included in the proposal are not currently included here.

Our work focuses on collaboration with people in a local area to make artwork that responds to the participants and the context of the location. We are excited by the opportunity to co-create a piece of public art working with people who live in the surrounding area and with the staff and students of the university.

We are interested in drawing inspiration from the green spaces in the area and using them as a starting point for a series of workshops that would shape the outcome of the final artwork. We feel that the theme of ‘Overlooked Nature’ in urban green spaces would be a productive starting point. The value of experiencing nature and having time and space to consider the flora and fauna that is everywhere, even on the outskirts of a city, is something we feel the local community and university students would share.

The framework of the piece would be an outdoor area containing a series of sculptures based on natural forms. The sculptures will have been designed and worked on by workshop participants in a way that allows them to be involved in generating ideas, identifying local wildlife and getting hands-on with the production of the pieces. We aim to make the sculptures from a range of materials that will allow the participants to help create them directly – for instance, by creating the positives for casting in bronze and working directly in clay that would be fired for outdoor conditions.

We have found that involving people in the whole process of creating a permanent public artwork is very rewarding for the participants and gives them a real sense of ownership over the piece. It also taps into community networks and can bring people together for creative activities they have never tried before.

We have found it is useful to have a loose theme at the beginning of the design workshops, as it allows people to join in easily. We think the theme of ‘Overlooked Nature’ would work well as a starting point, but we are happy to be flexible about this and be led by the participants. 

The theme of ‘overlooked nature’ would fit well with the green corridors in the local area that residents have identified as being of significant value, and would reflect these on a smaller scale. Just as the green corridors allow space for wildlife to live and for people to spend time with nature, patches of overlooked nature mirror this on a smaller scale, providing habitats for invertebrates and micro-organisms. Similarly, we feel that focusing on plants like mosses and lichen would be helpful, as these kind of sculptural forms would be accessible to work on with groups of beginners. As well as this, they would also create a striking sculptural presence and help create an area of contemplation and focus. We’re also open for this theme to develop as the participants become engaged in the process and begin to add suggestions as they see what is possible with the materials.

The theme of ‘Overlooked Nature’ also offers rich symbolism in terms of thinking about building relationships and community. Mosses and lichen are some of the building blocks of nature, important elements that need to be in place for other more visible plants to grow and thrive. They are also very influenced by the environment around them, particularly air quality. This could be an interesting point to consider with groups from across the university and the wider community: the shared environmental networks and conditions they live in and around.

We would aim to meet the requests of the community by helping to enhance cultural activity in the area. We feel that the opportunity to work directly on a public sculpture for their area will give a sense of achievement to the participants who will make a tangible contribution to the visual quality of their surroundings. Through the workshops we have developed in past projects, especially during the lockdown period, we have found that people find creative activity very beneficial in terms of well-being and community connections.. 

The open-ended nature of our approach would hopefully lend itself well to developing community connectivity: we have found that working creatively alongside others is a great way to build bonds and connections, harnessing a team spirit through production.

The materials we envisage using also lend themselves well to working in a pop-up manner, allowing us to work in a range of venues and locations, and hopefully maximise the accessibility of the project to the local community. We would also be keen to consider how we can include an online component to the project, allowing a further level of accessibility.

We would also be keen to co-design the layout of the space with participants, looking at how it can function as a useful and inviting resource. We imagine a space for well being, but also a space that can function as a place for study, for recreation, for learning: a meeting place, a teaching place, a social place. We feel that, with careful co-design, the space could offer a functional outdoor resource both for people living/ working on campus, and for the wider local community. We would be keen to look at ways the space could act as a place for communication: the opportunity to sit and talk for example, but also perhaps a space that could feature items such as sculptural notice boards, allowing campus members and the wider community to talk to each other in other ways, and create opportunities for meeting socially or for distributing information, in a similar manner to village notice boards.

Engagement would be at the heart of our project. We would be keen to implement strategies and methods of working that we have used in previous projects to ensure meaningful collaboration. Recruitment of participants would be key to this, and we would hope to work closely with all project partners to ensure we can capitalise on all existing networks, and look at areas of cross over and potential new networks. 

We would be keen to spend a period of time getting to know the staff and students of UWE and the wider local communities to help us build a sense of context and place, and to plant seeds for the project in people’s minds. We would also be keen to look closely at the architecture and future usage of the campus during this time, to help our thinking about how things will evolve and change for UWE and the surrounding community with the addition of the new campus. We would hope to introduce ourselves to departments at UWE that we could collaborate with, as well as identifying and meeting groups and organisations in the local community that could inform the project. We would also look at how we can bring these groups and departments together to work collectively with each other as well as with us. From this initial research we would then envisage devising a programme of engagement, in consultation with the project partners. The engagement programme would allow us to develop and refine our design ideas through a mixture of targeted and open workshops. We would be keen to devise a programme that has a structure mapped out but can also have flexibility to respond to networks, relationships and ideas that will develop. 

We see making as a fundamental component of working with people, and would structure our engagement around this approach. We find conversations flow easily when people are making: it creates a relaxed, open atmosphere that encourages people to participate at their own speed and comfort. We are comfortable working face-to-face and online to carry out workshops, and would be keen to use a blended approach throughout the engagement programme to maximise workshop accessibility. We would also respond to any particular access needs that arose during the collaboration.

The approach outlined above would hopefully allow us to create a useful, relevant and embedded piece of work that can enhance the campus experience and also act as a bridge to and from the wider community around the campus. Just as the ‘Overlooked Nature’ that would form our theme is a fundamental part of the environment, so too could the proposed space become a building block for the creation of interactions and experiences, and play an important part in the creation and sustainability of a new and exciting social environment. 

Involvement of participants with the design and fabrication of the work should foster a real sense of ownership. It should also help to make a work that has longevity and usefulness. We see it as a chance to make a real statement to the wider community in terms of the campus being open to them, as well as the staff and students. The importance of outdoor spaces has been highlighted by the pandemic, and hopefully this can be a genuine resource for people to use, enjoy and feel comfortable within. The work would hopefully continue to offer a bridge between the evolving student population on campus and the wider community, allowing principles built into the initial design to resonate into the future. We would be keen to foreground the idea of legacy when co-designing the space. How can the space continue to have relevance and importance?

We have outlined some of the materials we would hope to work with, such as cast bronze that can be coloured with a patina and brick clay blocks coloured with underglaze. These are materials that we have already worked projects with, and feel confident in our application of them to create a quality work that can be engaging, accessible and safe.

We are currently working with Ibstock at their brick factory near Bristol, using locally dug clay. We would be keen to further research locally available materials and processes for the fabrication of the sculptures.

In summary, we would be keen to create a new piece of work for Frenchay Campus that develops our process of collaborative working. It would create something that was made by people with a connection to the site and would be interacted with by generations of students and the community in years to come.

Ben Sadler and Philip Duckworth

Juneau Projects