Spaces and Young People Team Up For New Initiative

You can try your hand at digital art in a groundbreaking open weekend which allows young artists to test their ideas.

Matthew Annable, a Skipton-based musician and digital artist, and Mary Woolf, a Settle based photographic artist, are offering an opportunity to venture into the world of creative technology. At their base at Qworkery co-working space in Otley Street, Skipton, they are letting people of all ages have a go at painting in 3D using Virtual Reality (VR), bringing doodles to life with augmented reality and adding special effects (SFX) to games and then playing them.

It is all part of Watch This Space, our new initiative where we invited applications from people with wild ideas that had creativity and culture at their heart for support to stage a 48-hour pop-up showcase to try out their schemes. We also reached out for places which could be used as venues and teamed them up.

Matthew, Mary and Qworkery are the first partnership to run an idea. The event, which is free to drop in, will be open on Saturday and Sunday October 5 and 6 at Qworkery, 10am – 4pm.

Ambleside Parish Centre is the venue for the second Watch This Space project – Song Surgery, a new idea by Jane Rice-Bowen where people are ‘prescribed’ poetry and song. The event will be open to the public on Saturday November 9 and there will also be a rehearsal/workshop with Bradford College students on October 11.

Yorkshire Dales Guides HQ near Settle will then be transformed from its day-to-day role as a base for the outdoors company to a rehearsal space for young performers Ro Hardaker and Clementine Bogg-Hargroves. Ro is going to use the space and time to experiment with technology and green screens, while Clementine will practise using aerial in her next performance.

Emily Wilson, one of our consultants managing the project said: “We are really pleased to see artists being allowed to let their imaginations run riot as we offer them a temporary space to try something new. Watch This Space aims to support pilots which can be tried out, evolve and grow into bigger, exciting things.”

If you’re dropping in on the first project at Qworkery this weekend don’t forget it’s also Skipton Puppet Festival – where we are funding an Arts and Employability Masterclass on Friday 4 October, book for that here.