More Than a Hundred Stories

We are two artists, interested in how art can animate, challenge and create communities. We’ve been commissioned by Creative People and Places to creatively map and respond to its achievements, the problems it faces, and the questions it has generated.

We are interested in the programme’s ambition to change how art is commissioned and experienced and will be exploring how and to what extent this ambition has been realised across all 21 projects.

We will be posting creative responses to conversations, observations and research throughout the project and will share our final work with you in autumn 2016. Do join us and follow our creative journey on this blog.

You can find out more about our work at:
www.urbanwords.org.uk and www.nicolemollett.co.uk.

Sarah Butler and Nicole Mollett

Living Room

26.07.16

Nicole and I have been creating new pieces of work based around our ten themes and inspired by our visits, conversations and reading about the CPP programme.

Below is one new piece, inspired by stories I was told about Heart Of Glass's In My Place project, where local people could apply to have the Liverpool Philharmonic play in their home.

Cycling the ‘Northern Belt’ | Monday 14th September: Heart Of Glass, St Helens

18.09.15

My first CPP visit. As soon as I reach the centre of St Helen’s I recognise it from a video on Heart Of Glass’s website about their bugle call commissions. Always strange to have visited a place online before you’ve been there in person, it feels like creating a false memory.

I sit with a cup of tea and aching legs and listen to Kat and Laura talk me through the programme. Struck at once by how vast each CPP project is in its scope, my mind starts fretting at the very idea of trying to represent the stories of the whole programme. But more than that, I am inspired, excited, caught up with the ambition and the scale of what people are setting out to achieve.

Sarah Butler in St Helens

Cycling the ‘Northern Belt’ | a note

18.09.15

From 14-17th September I cycled from my home in Manchester to Heart of Glass, St. Helens; then LeftCoast, Blackpool and Wyre; and on to Super Slow Way, Pennine Lancashire (I will continue my journey east from Dewsbury to Hull next week). The following posts are some reflections from those visits. I have not included everything I did and everything I saw, but have tried to pull out the themes, ideas and questions that arose during my time with each project. I will be posting some creative responses in the coming weeks. You can also search #morethan100stories on Twitter for more photos and tweets from my journey.