Common Land Program

Hereford Photography Festival works in partnership with public, education and community sectors to create new, temporary, site-specific art commissions.

 Artists engage with groups through workshop programmes, creating a critical-practice context for their work and developing exhibitions and events for the festival’s programme.



CommonLand also runs a mentoring scheme for local
artists to work alongside commissioned artists and develop skills in socially-engaged and public realm artistic practice.



‘CommonLand seeks to identify itself in a test-bed of changing criteria; changing because all things are ever in flux and the current economic and global climate encourage us to consider things differently and faster. This must surely include asking questions about the production of art; why and in what context.

 At the point of conception of each CommonLand project is the process of engaging particular sectors of the community.

Each project becomes drawn out of and framed by this critical process. It becomes possible to identify the audience for art as part of the democracy of the art-making process itself - but in this context can an experienced artist retain a democracy of excellence? How do they go about bringing sectors of the community on a journey that seeks to dissolve the gap between artist and audience and become more about “active participation”?

 The production and placement of the photograph on the wall becomes another question.

New forms of regeneration are needed and different and new places to perform, hang or experience art start to evolve. Questions are explored about public spaces and how we occupy them.

 Consequently, CommonLand projects do not have a gallery-defined end point, if and how they are shown is perhaps more about a project in duration and momentary pausing. Human experience convenes within the frame of each commission, workshop process as well as finished photograph. These projects confirm that people can absorb energy from the open-ended process, and new ideas, changes, ways of working happen along the way.’



Dr Sally Payen MA RCA PhD
Common Land commissioned artist

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Diaspora

HPF will curate an exhibition of critical practice socially engaged artist's work from Poland around the effects of Migration for the 2011 Festival.

Part funded by the Polish Cultural Institute, the exhibition will lead to a series of engaged commissions with communities from Poland and Lithuania living in the UK for the 2012 Festival.

The project will link with Herefordshire Council's Destination Poland program.

 

ID Generation

Lead Artist Chris Preece along with Intertext and mentored artists Kerry O'Reilly and Luke Rodgers working with fostered young people in the looked after system on a video, digital and photography commission around self-identity.

An arts award project in partnership with Herefordshire Council.

Chris Preece 2011

 

re:create

Lead artist Becky Matthews together with a team of artists will develop the 2012 inspire marked project Focus Here. Working in Halo Leisure Centres around Herefordshire and thePoint4 in Hereford, the artists will look at body image and self-identity though engaging in sport, asking questions like what do we want to change into and why?

A partnership with thePoint4 and Halo Leisure.