Where: Pennine Lancashire including Blackburn, Darwen, Burnley, Pendle and Hyndburn
With: Canal & River Trust (CRT), Newground, Arts Partners Pennine Lancashire (APPL) University Collage Lancashire, Marketing Lancashire and the district authorities of Blackburn with Darwen, Hyndburn and Burnley and Pendle.

Super Slow Way works with communities along the Leeds & Liverpool Canal from Blackburn to Pendle. We connect people with local, national and international artists and commission projects that allow for collaboration and exploration of new ideas, creating spaces to look afresh at how people relate to their environment, neighbourhoods and to each other.

Over the past three years Super Slow Way have engaged over 100,000 people as audiences and active participants in a wide range of projects. We have brought artists to spend time on the towpath and in the empty mills, wharfs, libraries, churches and pubs along its stretch, to work with the people that live here to ask new questions, engender new conversations, nurture new relationships and see new possibilities. Together they have created new spaces for imagining what the world can be; in poems written and shouted from the rooftops by young boys who thought they had nothing to say, in short stories spoken by women walking along the canal together who believed they couldn’t speak, in songs soaring from hundreds of people singing together who hadn’t realised they had anything in common and in hundreds of other wondrous transformations that have been driven by art.

We have learnt so much from these people and places; about how and where they can be creative and over the phase of our work our vision is for the canal to become a vehicle for bringing communities together on a waterway which everyone shares, exploring how radical and ambitious art programming by the people of Pennine Lancashire can develop creativity, strength and connectedness across and within communities.

Watch this short film about the Shapes of Water, Sounds of Hope with artist Suzanne Lacey: