Projects

New Arts Festival for Coonabarabran in 2018

by Creatives Collective | Nov 30, 2017 | News, Projects

Creatives Collective has won a grant to stage a new art festival in Coonabarabran in 2018. The Articulate Festival will be a celebration of Art, Inclusion, and Culture and will consist of an art exhibition/competition, a community art creation event, a makers market, artist workshops, a film festival and a dinner with speakers to talk about art and well-being. Local artists, groups and businesses will all be invited to participate and the festival is expected to bring tourists and shire residents to Coonabarabran to experience this vibrant new cultural event.

The name Articulate was chosen because of dual meanings of the word – to allow two or more immovable objects to move by a special connection between them, and to clearly voice an idea, opinion or position. Creatives Collective see the festival as a way of bringing many individual groups together to move in the same direction for Coonabarabran, and as a way to give a platform via art for people to clearly express themselves.

The date for Articulate has not been set yet but will be in April/June 2018 and will be centered around the community theatre and Town Hall precinct which will be converted into a vibrant area with food trucks, live music, body painting and more.

“We are very excited, but the hard work starts now” says Creatives Collective president, Allison Reynolds, “We have a very large project plan that will involve many people from Coonabarabran. This event will bring all sorts of people and groups together to work with our members to make the Articulate Festival a huge success for Coonabarabran.”

Creatives Collective project plan was successful in applying for funds under the Team Up grant program. Team Up offered funds to people with disability to form peer groups, or groups that had already formed to create change in their community, leverage influence and develop leadership and other skills. Team Up is a project of Council for Intellectual Disability (CID), Community Disability Alliance Hunter (CDAH) and Diversity and Disability Alliance (DDA) and is funded by the NSW Government.

[IMAGE: Three round cartoon faces surrounded by arrows pointing signifying movement in one direction, next to the words Team Up Peers Creating Change]

If you want to contact Creatives Collective for any information then you can email them at info@creativescollective.org

Going Pro! 2018

by Creatives Collective | Oct 8, 2017 | Projects

We as a group have committed to improving our professional skills in 2018 to be able to sell our work and increase our profiles as artists. Sure we are leveraging disability, it’s what differentiates us from other artists. We naturally have to be more innovative, work with more constraints and be braver with publicly speaking about, and displaying our works. It makes us better artists, despite the able attitude that we are held back by our impairments.

We have applied for CASP and RAF grants that will help us with sourcing educators, mentors, and exhibition requirements for a year of pushing ourselves out of comfort zones and into the bright lights of promotion, marketing and being in the local community’s face (in a nice way of course). At the time of writing there’s about a month till the successful grant applications are announced. We are quietly confident, and mildly anxious.

We have also applied for a grant for 3 Microsoft Surface Pros so we can jump into the work of digital art and expand our knowledge and works into a more “modern” place. Paintings of gum trees are nice and all, but we have things to say and we are looking for interesting ways to say it. These tables are light and easy to use and for some of our members will be perfect to work with as they are less fatiguing than a PC or laptop.

2018 is also the year we hope to be able to find a studio space that we can call our own. Politics and more politics in this area make it difficult. This will be our biggest challenge – keep watching this space 😉

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION 6 sharpie textas in rainbow coloured order]