Changing Landscapes, Changing Lives
Project Artist Brief and Application Process
Type of contract: Freelance
Duration of contract: September 2015 – June 2016
Total number of working days: 47
Fee: £9,400 (at a rate of £200 per day including all artist’s fees and expenses)
1. Summary:
The Laing Art Gallery is inviting applications from experienced and suitably qualified
artists/facilitators to lead Changing Landscapes, Changing Lives a project that will engage a range
of audiences and support them to explore archival material from the Tate archives online, Tyne &
Wear Archives & Museums collections and local archives in the Newcastle area.
The role of the Project Artist will be to lead a series of sessions with different groups including
school students, people over the age of 55 and young people who are not in employment,
education or training. These sessions will enable participants to creatively respond to the archive
collections and contribute to the creation of artwork and both physical and digital learning
resources which will reflect the overall project theme of how rural and urban landscapes have
changed over time in Newcastle and the impact this has had on peoples’ lives.
Applicants are requested to read the full contents of this Project Artist Brief document carefully, as
it contains important information about the project and the application process.
Changing Landscapes, Changing Lives is part of Archives and Access, a national programme of
digital access, learning and participation with archives and heritage led by Tate and supported by
the Heritage Lottery Fund.
2. Changing Landscapes, Changing Lives - Project Background
Learning at Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums
This role will be managed by the Learning Officer at Laing Art Gallery.
Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums (TWAM) brings learning to life across 9 different venues, each
with their own unique collections. With recognised collections of archaeology, art, history and
natural science, some of them of national and international importance, we have something to offer
everyone.
TWAM’s skilled and enthusiastic Learning Team can support a wide range of different audiences.
Our diverse collections are interpreted by a range of subject specialists, and our learning
opportunities are designed to effectively meet the needs of different groups.
Our inspiring venues and collections are a powerful resource that are capable of enriching the
learning of all ages and abilities, helping to make a positive difference to people’s lives.
In our work we aim to:
Support all audiences in their learning
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Make the most of the resources the museum offers
Show that museums are valuable resources for learning for all audiences
We are committed to delivering high quality learning experiences through:
Using collections and environments
Developing inspiring experiences by exploiting our unique resources
Delivering experiential, multi-sensory, interactive, and creative experiences
Find out more about learning at Laing Art Gallery here:
http://www.twmuseums.org.uk/schools/laing-art-gallery.html
Archives and Access
Changing Landscapes, Changing Lives is part of Archives and Access, an ambitious five-year
programme of digital access, learning and participation with archives and heritage, led by Tate and
supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund. It is making 52,000 items from Tate’s archives fully
accessible online and inviting participation and shared learning through a new interactive Albums
feature on the Tate website. Albums allows people to group, tag, annotate and share their own
collections of artworks and archive items and online visitors will also be able to access a series of
resources such as films and study guides related to the digitised archive collections.
These archive materials and digital tools will be used as the basis for partnership learning projects
in five different areas of the UK between 2013–2017. The programme involves Tate Liverpool; the
Josef Herman Art Foundation Cymru, Ystradgynlais; Tate Britain, London; The Laing Art Gallery
(Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums), Newcastle; and Turner Contemporary, Margate.
These learning projects will enable new audiences to engage with the digitised archives and
Albums, and to work with artists to make their own creative responses which will form the basis for
new learning resources for publication online.
You can find out more about Archives and Access here:
http://www.tate.org.uk/about/projects/transforming-tate-britain-archives-and-access.
3. Changing Landscapes, Changing Lives - Project Aims
This project will focus on engaging harder to reach communities through an exploration of their
evolving physical environment, reflecting the move from the rural to industrial and now to a postindustrial landscape, as well as giving the opportunity to examine the resulting impacts on the
different communities’ economic and cultural lives. This will be made possible by using specific
Tate Archive collections online as a point of historical and cultural reference. The project will also
use the archives and collections of the Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums network (TWAM), as
well as artworks on display at the Laing Art Gallery. It will focus on engaging school students,
young people who are not in employment, education or training (NEETs) and the older generation
(over 55s) to create an intergenerational learning focus that brings issues from the past and the
present together.
Participants will include:
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Pre NEETs: a term that represents a student who is still attending an educational institution but
may be out of mainstream education and are at risk of becoming NEET when leaving school.
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NEETs: people aged 18-25 who are out of employment or training.
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People aged over 55 who form part of TWAM’s Platinum Programme, which is TWAM’s culture
and heritage programme of inspiring activities and experiences for people aged over 55 to get
involved in.
School students taking part in the annual Articulate programme.
4. Changing Landscapes, Changing Lives – Detailed engagement description
The project will deliver 30 workshops which will enable 710 instances of participation. There will
also be two launch events at the end of the project which we anticipate 350 will attend and a wider
engagement of an estimated 600 contributors to an online community gallery. The project will
include training in archive and digitisation processes, working with museum Learning staff across
the TWAM network to develop their knowledge and capacity, as well as the main body of this
project, for which the Project Artist will work with groups of older and younger people and students
at risk, to explore the changing local environment and industrialisation in the North East.
A series of workshops will take place which will make use of art-based activities to explore archives
and heritage. The programme will be planned with the selected Project Artist to bring their own
creative practice to bear on the activities and workshops. A range of visual materials will be used
from Tate’s online archives and the TWAM collection both in their archives and on display in the
Northern Spirit gallery at the Laing Art gallery. Activities will make use of objects that can be
handled and a range of different art techniques. Art-based activities will provide a starting point for
looking closely at collection objects and ideas about heritage and for prompting discussion. For
example, a participating group might be invited to consider representations of the local landscape
in a range of archive materials and respond creatively using sea coal as a medium, a material
derived from the landscape itself.
The workshops will be shaped by the participants’ responses and interests and build the
participants’ own skills to create a photographic archive, albums, exhibitions and online community
photo-gallery. The project will produce not just images of the landscape and context of the region
today, but will also document the conversations and changing perspectives of the older and
younger participants as they develop through the project. For example we might do this by creating
a dialogue through exchange of images – either paintings or photographs.
The resulting images will provide an online gallery of work for the Albums platform on the Tate
website that shows original artworks and archive materials from Tate’s digitised archive and
images from local archives and people’s own personal collections in juxtaposition with
contemporary images created by the participants. These will be accessed in conjunction with their
own documentation of the process, their thoughts and changing perspectives: a living archive of
their own experiences with their heritage. These materials will also be added to an interactive map
on display in the Northern Spirit gallery.
5. Project Artist Role
Main purpose of role:
The Project Artist will lead the development and delivery of an arts programme with school
students, young people who are not in employment, education or training (NEET) and older
peoples groups over 55s. The Project Artist will use Tate archives online, Laing collections and
other local archives to create learning resources for Tate’s website, a digital interactive map on site
at the Laing and a memory box (a tangible resource to be used as a legacy to the project with
groups visiting the Laing).
Main Tasks:
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Write a project plan in conjunction with the Project Team and the Laing Art Gallery team
and representatives from the participating groups;
Create workshop plans to engage groups;
Conduct research into local and Tate archives and Laing collections on the theme of
landscape and social change;
Deliver the required number of participatory arts workshops to groups;
In collaboration with the Learning Officer, support the Project Intern in gaining skills and
experience in the research, planning, delivery, documentation and evaluation of the project;
Work closely with the Project Team to deliver all aspects of the project;
Attend all internal and external planning, project monitoring and evaluation meetings as
necessary;
Keep financial records of all expenditure for reporting to Project Team.
Reporting:
The Project Artist will:
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Attend meetings and deliver presentations as and when required;
Report to Laing Art Gallery’s Learning Officer on all aspects of the project;
Liaise with the Learning Officer on points of clarification throughout the project;
Provide documentation of the learning resource design and specifications, which will
remain the property of Laing Art Gallery;
Contribute to reporting and evaluation requirements throughout the project for the purposes
of the Archives and Access project evaluation led by an independent Learning Evaluator
and of reporting to the Heritage Lottery Fund.
6. Project Artist fee and timetable breakdown
The fee for this project is £9,400.
The fee will be paid in 3 phases over the duration of the project on completion of set targets to the
satisfaction of the Project Team.
The fee covers 47 working days as follows:
47 days @ £200 per day = £9,400
Participation in Project Trainee interviews
1 day
Participation in Training and Practice Sharing workshops
led by Archives and Access team
2 days
Planning time for workshops
7 days
Delivery of sessions for NEET young people, school students and
and over 55s groups (30 x 2 hour workshops and 2 events)
16 days
Developing content/resources
10 days
Planning and installation of exhibition
4 days
Planning, meetings
7 days
Total (@ £200 per day = £9,400)
47 days
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There will be a materials and equipment budget of up to £2,000 for the project.
7. Application Process
Artists/facilitators are invited to submit applications that set out their proposed methodology for
researching, devising and facilitating a series of workshops for the project. The workshops should
draw on the artist/facilitator’s practice, archival material and the project theme of changing
landscapes and be tailored to the needs of the different audience groups. The proposal should
also address how the workshops will generate content for the physical learning resource and the
digital learning resources to be shared through TWAM’s and Tate’s websites.
To be considered for this role, please provide:
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an up-to-date CV including the names and contact details of two referees;
a short personal statement providing evidence of your experience as an artist/facilitator
and suitability for this role (this should be no longer than 1500 words in length);
an initial proposal outlining your approach to the project including how you will research, codesign and produce the learning resources in collaboration with the project participants (this
should be no longer than 1500 words in length).
Submissions should be sent by email FAO Anne Fountain, Learning Officer, Laing Art Gallery at
learning@laingartgallery.org.uk by 31 August 2015
The post is subject to enhanced DBS check, including barred lists.
The selection panel will consider these submissions and select a shortlist of suitably qualified
artists/facilitators for interview. Selected candidates will be invited for interview week commencing
21 September and will be required to make a 10 minute presentation to the panel.
The panel will consist of:
1. Julie Milne, Chief Curator of Art Galleries
2. Anne Fountain, Learning Officer, Laing and Shipley Art Galleries
3. Sally Davies, Curator: Learning Outreach (Archives and Access), Tate
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