Embedded Artists Programme
We’re delighted to share that The Work Room has received generous funding from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s Arts Fund, towards building our organisational capacity, and supporting the influence we can bring through towards a more equitable dance sector in Scotland.
TWR was established with an artist-led ethos and membership model to reflect a commitment to distributed leadership. Our working context has changed significantly since our beginnings in 2008, and our membership has expanded exponentially, with now over 260 independent dance artists living and working across Scotland. This throws our artist-led model into sharp focus and how we most effectively use our resources.
As a community of artists, over recent years we been exploring:
How The Work Room can activate and evolve a more dispersed, networked organisational model for members across Scotland – one that practices reciprocity at its heart.
Over the next three years we will test this through an Embedded Artists action research project.
Later this year, we will begin recruiting Embedded Artists from our membership - as part of our staff team, to explore and enhance how we operate as a dispersed artistic network, activating connections and cultivating a more reciprocal and equitable organisational model.
Over the three years, we will recruit 6 artists to this programme – each will be contracted for the equivalent of 2 days/ 14 hours a week for 12 months. These will be salaried roles based on £32,000 pro rata. They will be flexible contracts to enable the embedded artists to work responsively around freelance and project work, and other commitments.
The embedded artists roles will have two key aspects and we anticipate their time being split equally across these over their contracted time:
- To support the artists with salaried time for the ‘in between’ of their freelance work and maintain an active creative practice in their locality;
- To play a ‘community enabler role’ in encouraging The Work Room’s dispersed membership of independent dance artists;
This embedded artists approach, recognises that in dance those who are most critical to the artform - literally putting their bodies into the work - are living with the most precarity. Freelance dance artists are often lacking agency in influencing cultural policy, funding and conditions. We are seeking to address this through working with a cohort of artists over the 3 years who will have the security of some regular, salaried time.
We will be moving forward with recruitment for the first two embedded artist in November. As part of the recruitment, we will ask applicants to propose ideas of how they would approach the ‘community enabler’ role and any particular focus that they would like to bring to this such as geographic, community of interest or dance genre.
About Paul Hamlyn Foundation
PHF’s mission is to be an effective and independent funder, using all their resources to create opportunities and support social change. PHF partner with inspiring organisations and individuals to put them at the heart of leading change and designing solutions to overcome inequality.