The Atelier takes place in Trotternish, Waternish and Duirinish, Isle of Skye 9th-13th MAY 2016 with Atlas Arts http://atlasarts.org.uk
What is ‘Atelier, Skye’?
A charrette is an intensive participatory group that engages a common enquiry. Atelier, Skye is a three-day charrette wherein a group of artists, curators, academic researchers and members of Atlas Arts will work with a series of common research ‘objects’ located in the north of the Isle of Skye (Trotternish, Waternish and Duirinish).
Working with the charrette curators, ATLAS Arts have identified a series of sites and objects that will facilitate and contrast different methods of visual and material enquiry. These objects range from artefacts in local museums, to areas of outstanding natural beauty. By engaging with ‘things’ in the custodianship of Atlas Arts, our charrette will enable us to map and improve conditions for cross-disciplinary collaboration, shifting the emphasis away from doing research towards the creation of research objects.
We aim to assist Atlas Arts in meeting their aims and obligations as the primary arts organisation for Skye and Lochalsh and thus to the local populace. We will enable this by enlisting Atlas Arts to collaborate directly with artists, arts professionals and academics in the creation of common research objects. The charrette will transform participants’ understanding of what material research is, what it can be and of who/what might participate in it. We also hope to use our visit to establish an open access online archive of the project, proxy distributed by Atlas Arts, that will ensure Atelier’s methods are available to artists, researchers and educators working with comparable community-based and site-sensitive organisations.
What is ‘Skye’?
For the purposes of this project, Skye functions as host environment for engaging a broader community of academics and non-academics in contemporary art and materialist research. It is both a slowly changing land mass and a more rapidly transforming series of agents, things and discourses. ‘Skye’ is a contingent object, one in an ongoing process of flow and growth. Following the material-turn, it is appropriate that we do not presuppose a singular thematic or disciplinary approach towards ‘Skye’. This is why participants will work only from things hosted by the island, discovering a varied flow of entanglements over the duration of the charrette. Our initial meetings with Atlas Arts Director Emma Nicholson established our objects of enquiry, the journeys our research group will make around the island, the iterative structure of the charrette research process and the ways in which we will document this.
What is ‘Atlas Arts’?
Based in Portree, ATLAS Arts seeks to be a pioneering producer and commissioner of contemporary art that will create connections between artists and audiences, and respond to the unique qualities of this region, its landscapes, its culture and its people. http://atlasarts.org.uk
