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.
11:34Yeah.
11:36and like the apple of
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