On Friday 28 August 2020 I had the opportunity to explore Cornerstone Arts which was open for much of the following Bank Holiday weekend, sharing exhibitions, film screenings, comfy couches and elements of the unexpected (nice to find out more about the Vikings through a chat with a re-enactor). Cornerstone provided an opportunity to meet people and appreciate the creativity and community of Darlington.

The venue offers artists an opportunity to share their work and ideas onto both the high street and also within a space which felt a little like an indoor park in scale, with opportunity to walk about and explore work by artists who were both known and unknown to me.

I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next and wanted to pass on my thanks to everyone whose made this happen, and wishing Cornerstone Arts success in achieving further ambitions.

Counting the days until TeesDance Festival, happening on Instagram in two weeks’ time – find out all about our local dance artists and gain an insight into the creative industries

It’s here! The full line-up for TeesDance Festival, happening on Instagram from 1 – 14 August to celebrate our dance workforce across the Tees Valley

Call Out One

‘Our Place’ – a community Art’s Project for Darlington

Want to give meaning and purpose to your daily walk?

In these strange times, leaving the house at least once a day and getting some fresh air is so important to many of us. Join in a range of weekly creative tasks and really ‘see’ your surroundings; use these discoveries to reflect upon and speak of your life and experiences in Darlington.

Where do our paths cross or perhaps diverge? Who knows? Over the course of four online workshops (each lasting around one hour) we’ll explore and make. Our aim … to contribute to a bigger project ‘It’s All Happening Here’ and hopefully a live celebratory trail around the town. Our contribution… possibly a piece weaving together footage of Darlington captured through street view, overlaid with spoken word gathered from letters, poems, diary entries or just fragments of thoughts. Creation for the curious!

No special skills or prior experience required. All ages and backgrounds welcome. How much, and how often, you join us is up to you. No cost involved.

Email Hannah at ourplacedarlo@gmail.com with any questions you have or to register your interest.

Call Out Two

Call Out Three

Darlington Society of Arts have been sharing their work during lockdown through their website.The Arts Society are certainly seeing Lockdown as an opportunity to make work and share, in their words ‘Remember every cloud has a silver lining.’

Members have been invited to create work responding to a common stimulus or to post work they have created during the lockdown period. This has been a great way of sharing the practice of the group and encouraging ongoing creative engagement.

Be sure to head over the the Arts Society website to have a look at what they’ve been creating and sharing digitally.

Creative Darlington supported Conversations in Painting: Fiesta MK 2 in 2019. It’s great to be able to celebrate this project and view the overall project within the project catalogue, available to view online at here

Have you ever fancied making a short film? Or are you trying to find a fun way to keep your family entertained?

Creative Darlington and Undivided Pictures are looking for short films featuring ‘Lockdown’ as the theme to enter our competition, with the winner to receive £100 worth of vouchers to Darlington Hippodrome. 

As long as you stick to government guidelines then you can be as creative as you want. We’d love to see a mixture of drama, comedy, dance, song or anything that you think will be entertaining. Please ensure the films are under four minutes and include a maximum of four characters.

The competition was created by Susie Potter and Dalton Deverell whose creative roots both started in Darlington.

“We think now is the perfect time for people to flex their creative muscles and we’re excited to see the entries”

“Short films can make a welcome break to your everyday and we’re hoping people enjoy the experience of creating the content”

They might be shot on your phone, or laptop using one of the group apps like Zoom, whatever you think works best for your film. We’re looking for zero budget masterpieces so please check with whoever pays the bill if you’re using someone else account. Don’t worry too much about the editing- just send us your finished version and we can always spruce it up a bit in post production! We recommend using WeTransfer to send your film, as it’s free and will allow you to send over a bigger file.

We have a panel of judges who will whittle the entries down to the top 5 and then it will be put to a public vote.

Questions and entries to be sent to darlingtonshortfilmcomp@gmail.com

This call out is open to those who live or work in Darlington

Submit your films from 6th May.

Open call closes 12 noon Friday 22nd May 2020.

Tracks​ in partnership with ​Creative Darlington ​and​ Darlington Borough Council ​are pleased to announce an additional series of live streamed gigs, bringing a further selection of regional artists to your home in this time of national lockdown.

With measures being extended we felt it was important to carry forward our series of live stream gigs so the people of Darlington and beyond can continue filling their housebound calendars with events to look forward to and enjoy, whilst also helping to keep artists’ platforms of expression alive.

After Nadedja’s already scheduled performance on Friday 24th, the second run of Facebook live stream sessions welcomes Claire Tustin from Lullaboogaloo to perform a special family gig on Saturday 25th for BIG Little Gigs, with the weekend run being completed by local favourite Chris Davison on Sunday 26th.

The next set of three kicks off on Thursday 30th with George Boomsma, Caitlin Morrow the day after, and the whole series is rounded off on Saturday 2nd with another Silly Song Singalong with BIG Little Gigs’ own Sarah Wilson at 2pm.

“We’d never run any online gigs before these, and we’ve been really pleased with people’s responses. It’s been so nice having that communication between artist and audience. It’s also been great to offer some support to local musicians who are struggling during lockdown”

Nadedja

Friday 24th @ 7pm
Born in the North-East of Brazil but now making the North East of England her home, Nadedja’s beautiful music combines her soulful, soaring vocals with piano and acoustic guitar-infused melodies, showcasing her honest, raw and heartfelt lyrics drawn from her experiences. Her debut single, ‘Fire’, was selected as track of the week on BBC Introducing and has been featured on BBC Sounds podcast, ‘The Next Episode’.

BIG Little Gigs featuring Claire Tustin from Lullaboogaloo

Saturday 25th April @ 2pm

Join Claire as she live streams her songs for small children. Sing along and have a boogie whilst she sings about mini-beasts, dancing animals, grandmas on roller skates and springtime. If you send her a message mid-gig, she might put your favourite animal into a song! Deely boppers, animal onesies and rabbit ears welcome

Chris Davison

Sunday 26th April @ 7pm
Stalwart of the local music scene, multi instrumentalist and band member of Weekend Sun, Astoma and many more, Chris will be performing a mixture of originals with a few covers thrown in for good measure, all powered by his menagerie of electronic augmentations. Send him some love and he may even do a request or two.

George Boomsma

Thursday 30th April @ 7pm

George Boomsma is a progressive folk musician from Northallerton. His effortless vocals and sensitive guitar playing are achingly beautiful and have received national airplay on Radio 1 and BBC 6Music. This will be a beautiful laid back performance, something special to soothe our souls in these uncertain times.

Caitlin Morrow

Friday 1st May @ 7pm
Sweet songs and heartfelt lyrics, Caitlin’s adorable acoustics will have you smiling all stream long, as her delicate voice leads you through some outstanding originals.

BIG Little Gigs: Silly Song Singalong with Sarah Wilson

Saturday 2nd May @ 2pm
Sarah and her trusty ukulele are back with even more silly songs to share with you and your little ones. Grab your shakers and cardboard guitars and join her for songs about friendship, jungles, poems and more!

To access any of the FREE ​darlo@home​ live stream gigs simply tune in to the Tracks Facebook page at the times above, sit back and enjoy!

Our Facebook link: ​https://www.facebook.com/tracksdarlington

The Auxiliary have teamed up with Creative Darlington for our next round of ABODE, an artist-in-own-residence programme. For this project we will be offering five mini-grants of £200, with the hope that it encourages artists to develop new skills and to consider new approaches to their creative practices. 

The open call is simple. Select a free open source programme from the list below, download it, install it and start learning, experimenting, succeeding, failing and creating.   

There is a lot to play with here, whether its creating music in Pure Data, 3D sculptures in Blender, crazy visuals in VVVV or even turning your Skype into something fun with the green screen function of OBS… the possibilities are truly endless. 

At the end of quarantine, we will invite everyone to share the work with The Auxiliary and the wider community. Along the way we will also encourage artists to send in what they are working on and share it online. 

The four programmes to choose from are Blender, VVVV, Pure Data and OBS Studio. 

Blender is a 3D computer graphics software tool-set used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D printed models, motion graphics, interactive 3D applications, and computer games.

VVVV is a general purpose toolkit with a special focus on real-time video synthesis and programming large media environments with physical interfaces, real-time motion graphics, audio and video

Pure Data (Pd) is a visual programming language for creating interactive computer music and multimedia works.

Open Broadcast Studio 

OBS Studio is a free and open-source software suite for recording and live streaming. OBS provides real-time source and device capture, scene composition, encoding, recording, and broadcasting.  

During this residency, we will host a number of live Q&A sessions with experts in the aforementioned programmes, taking inquiries about the programmes. Even if not successful with receiving a grant the Q&A will be open to the public and we do encourage everyone to explore the above programs as they provide a wealth of exciting possibilities.

Apply By: 28th April, 2020

Open to DL postcodes only.

Single A4 Page Application emailed to theauxiliaryprojectspace@gmail.com 

Please include the following:

1. Artistic Practice Description.

2. Which programme who will work with.

3. Rough idea of the project’s ambition.

4. Links to previous work.

5. Website.

Creative Darlington is a partnership of organisations and stakeholders who share a passion to strengthen and sustain a vibrant cultural offer for Darlington. Our work is focused on arts and heritage and informed by the principles that the culture should be available to everyone, bring people together and champion inclusion and social cohesion. We value excellence, by which we mean striving to be the best of which we are collectively capable and finding ingenious ways to take things forward. 

To find out more about Creative Darlington see https://creativedarlington.org.uk/

Creative Darlington have worked in partnership with long standing Darlington based, all female artist collective blimey! to further explore their collective practice and create work which considers themes presented in Guido Reni’s baroque painting ‘The Death of Lucretia’.

More information about the project, exhibition and artists can be found here www.blimeycollective.co.uk/blimeylucretia

Unfortunately the current exhibition at The Bowes Museum is not currently accessible due to Covid-19, but you can still watch the project documentary film to further understand the context and the artists’ responses to this.

The film and photography featured within the blimey! Lucretia exhibition at The Bowes Museum document the Piercing Lucretia events. This series of events took place in a number of venues and engaged with various audiences. These included the opening night of the Guido Reni – The Power and The Virtue exhibition at The Bowes Museum which launched the project, Crown Street Art Gallery at Crown Street Library, Darlington and Queen Elizabeth Sixth Form College, Darlington.

The project included collaborative events with Lust For Life Drawing, Nasty Women North East and Eliot Smith Dance. A diverse range of participants at each event offered opportunities for a range of creative responses to be made. This included artists, writers, local and international students and the public. Participants and these interactions were recorded to share this creative process.

Click the following link to watch the documentary film. https://www.blimeycollective.co.uk/documentary-film

Film & Photography Credit : Joanne Coates