Creative Crawley open days at the new artist makerspace in West Green, Crawley in partnership with Theatre Centre. It is a hub for professional artists in Crawley to create, collaborate and develop their practice. We caught up with Creative Crawley director Louise Blackwell and Theatre Centre artistic director Eleanor Manners and met artist Lonny Chauhan, architect Karl Singporewala, and designers Beth Williams and Sophie Merriner
00:00My name is Louise Blackwell and I'm the creative director of Creative Crawley.
00:15Over the past few years we've been talking to lots of local people, lots of local creative
00:20professionals and they told us that there is nowhere to make their work in Crawley and we're
00:26thinking about the whole town and how we can kind of really help the ecology of this town
00:31and help it be better for people who live here.
00:34And so we have been working with Theatre Centre who are a national touring theatre company
00:39who are now based in this space, One Town Barham Road is the address and thanks to funding
00:44from the Shared Prosperity Fund by Crawley Borough Council and Arts Council England we've made
00:50this lovely building which used to feel much more like a kind of old-fashioned community
00:56centre into what I think personally is a very cool, very creative space with lots of artist
01:03studios and so there's now architects, fashion designers, all sorts of people here and the
01:09idea is is that we want to create a space where creative professionals can come and hang out,
01:13can meet each other, can make their work here but also who knows what might happen if there's
01:19a bunch of amazing people in one place at the same time, all sorts of things could happen.
01:23We've got three so this is the second of three and the next one's on the 12th of June and what's
01:28really exciting is that there have been people coming to visit, there's been students coming
01:31to visit and because lots of the artists who are based here now are fairly recent graduates so they
01:37grew up in Crawley and then they moved away, went to amazing kind of fantastic art schools or
01:42universities and then have come back now to Crawley so they're really brilliant role models for young
01:48people here who might be interested in the creative industries and who might be being told don't work
01:54in the arts there's no money or it's really difficult or all of that but you know the creative industries
02:00deliver 124 billion pounds to our economy each year and so it is worth working in the creative industries
02:07and that's partly what we're trying to do here is just raise the ambition of what's possible and also
02:12create a home for amazing creative professionals.
02:15It was big, it was big, did it move? What did it?
02:19You made a car that moved on wheels? That's amazing!
02:23I'm Eleanor, I am the new Artistic Director at Theatre Centre.
02:27Yeah so Theatre Centre is a national touring company, we make work with and for young people that goes into schools and venues
02:33and we're one of the resident artists here in West Green and so there's a number of different resident artists
02:40and yeah we're just one of the companies!
02:42How exciting is it to have these open days and have different people from the town coming in to visit?
02:47It's been really brilliant, I think especially for Theatre Centre what's really great is we're meeting a whole
02:51range of different people so we've spoken to some councillors, we've spoken to some young people
02:55because we make work with and for young people which is brilliant but also we're meeting different artists from around Crawley
03:00who might also then eventually feed into our work.
03:06I'm Lonnie Chahan, I'm an artist from Crawley based in Free Bridges, I graduated from Leeds Arts last year
03:16and then I was commissioned by Creative Crawley to do this window.
03:21So the overall installation is called Figures of Fragility, it's made up of two works of mine,
03:29one of the big sculptures called Embodiment of Fatigue and the other ones are Sculptural Diary.
03:35They all stem from my experience with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or ME which is an illness which causes excessive tiredness and pain among other symptoms.
03:46And so, I mean quite self explanatory, embodiment of fatigue is an expressive embodiment of how I feel on my worst days.
03:58Which has been quite powerful in kind of connecting to other people, I've had a lot of people come up to me when I've showed the work before and they've been like this is exactly how I feel and it's the first time I feel seen with my work.
04:10Oh wow.
04:11So it's been, I didn't realise how powerful it could be with that but it feels extra important to be showing it opposite the hospital so it's like high fitting.
04:20Yes, of course.
04:21And then the Sculptural Diary was, again kind of as the name suggests, it was a diary I did through sculpture to document what it was like to live with Chronic Fatigue.
04:31So I set myself a few set rules such as once I started and then stopped for the day it was done I can take breaks and I would record obviously the date and the time that I did it at each day and how long I could do it for.
04:48Okay.
04:49So there's a whole variation of them but they're kind of just like sculptural sketches but you'll see there's a lot of empty shelves and those are the days that I was too unwell to do anything so they almost become more important.
05:02My name is Carl Singh Paul Waller, I'm an architect and artist and now based here in Crawley.
05:17I've been a chartered architect for about 18 years now and I was born and grew up in Crawley but I've always commuted out if that makes sense.
05:32So Creative Crawley has a lot to answer for actually and giving me the confidence to actually go, do you know what, your studio can be here as such.
05:46And having this new space here which is the old Age UK, Age Concern building is wonderful.
05:57I mean this used to be the old kitchen and to have this as a sculpture studio I really do count my blessings.
06:03I've also got it as a workshop overall and I mean this is wonderful to be able to be drawing, put the computer down and actually go and actually make it.
06:15and actually make bits of maquettes and models and prototypes for various details and components and then come back to the drawing.
06:24So having that sort of workshop studio set up is perfect for the type of practice that I run overall.
06:34Some of the pieces I'm making at the moment are for a solo exhibition in London at the SOAS Gallery this summer which is from July to September.
06:45And some of the pieces for that it's all about memory, the Zoroastrian culture and family.
06:54So being in this space, looking at that building, knowing that I was in here with my granddad helping out all those years ago.
07:02While making pieces about family and ancestral background. It's perfect.
07:10This is great to be able to talk about this.
07:13So last year, via Creative Crawley, I got introduced to Steve Sawyer who's the head of Manor Royal Bid.
07:25And we started talking about some of the great work they're doing in the Manor Royal area.
07:33And he was talking about various locations for different types of sculpture.
07:37And my only sort of links to Manor Royal was my father used to work at Redifusion in the 70s and 80s.
07:46And I think the sort of legacy of Redifusion is now Talus and L3 Harris, correct?
07:54So they've always been a big mainstay in the area.
07:58But we were talking about that in my memory of Redifusion being this much more family orientated company where they had the Christmas dues.
08:08The first time I met Santa Claus was at Redifusion and so forth like that.
08:14And so I took the Redifusion logo and worked up this new concept essentially for a start.
08:23And what I've been commissioned to do is it's a six meter high steel sculpture about three meters wide in diameter.
08:32And it's going to be installed from about the 12th of June this year.
08:36And these, what I've got here, these are the prototype spikes from that sculpture overall.
08:45And the whole point of prototyping is how things fit together.
08:51You know, is it the right material?
08:53Have you got the bends and the welds in the right places?
08:57So working on that and then refining it as we go around.
09:03We did about five prototypes with a fabrication company called Cake Industries.
09:08And once we moved on to the actual final piece, these prototype pieces in themselves were, I found them very beautiful.
09:17So we made it into this pentechist arrangement and it's become a sculpture in its own right.
09:23So no waste with the trials we were going through as well.
09:29But I'm really looking forward to installing the full sculpture on Manor Royal Road next month.
09:37And this will be my largest public sculpture to date.
09:42I just love it. It's all that warm and lived in.
09:46I'm Beth. I am a fashion designer and multidisciplinary artist.
09:52I mainly work with biomaterials, living textiles, knitwear, lots of cool things.
10:00Very, very much more of a research slash art based practice.
10:04I make a lot of wearable art pieces and conceptual editorial pieces where it's more about storytelling
10:10and getting people to think about how they consume fashion and asking questions around sustainability
10:17and if there's better choices to make.
10:20Cool. My name's Sophie. I am a fashion designer and bridal wear designer.
10:26I specialise in luxury women's wear and bridal wear, but a lot of my concepts with my clothing that I design
10:34are inspired by my upbringing and my background with political and philosophical undertones.
10:44And I do a lot of work with laser cutting as well.
10:47I met Louise I think early last year.
10:51She saw my work in an exhibition in Crawley and she got in touch with me
10:55and then offered me and Beth to join her with the curating the fashion show for Crawley.
11:03And then we then got offered the opportunity to become local resident artists here.
11:08So yeah, and then we've got a fashion studio that we share now, which is really great.
11:12Yeah. Have you had a fashion studio before?
11:14Or is it just the first one you've ever saw?
11:16A bedroom?
11:18Is it at home? Is it any place in my house where I can kindly sit and juicely?
11:23Yeah. But no, this is the first proper professional studio.
11:29Yeah. That wasn't like an educational studio as such.
