Longhouse have commissioned a number of artists to provide case studies for the website. The case studies will be act as a useful resource for artists to understand different ways of working and show strong examples of best practice working in the public realm.

Jeni Burnell – Developing Public Art

‘Development is when people, however poor in money, get together, get organised, become sophisticated and go to scale.’

Developing Public Art is an investigation that aims to combine development based community action planning tools and techniques with a public art agenda in order to increase public artists’ agency in community development. The programme will be based on assessment of current public art practice combined with a rigorous action research programme focusing on art based community development projects – selected because of their individual ambitions to use public art methods for engaging with communities in order to empower people and, in turn, affect a larger strategic agenda.

Shaheen Ahmed and Sue Challis – Collaboration

Longhouse has commissioned artists Sue Challis and Shaheen Ahmed to document their development as an artistic collaboration on the Longhouse website. Sue and Shaheen will be documenting how their collaboration works and why it works. Sue and Shaheen will be carrying out the project in the New Year so please check their project page for updates.

This project sets to look at collaborative practice and how two artists from different cultural backgrounds with different practices reach an equal relationship in their collaboration. Sue and Shaheen will record their conversations and ways of working as a collaboration, trying to answer some of the following questions:

• How does this process work?
• What is the process/ method of communication?
• What are the benefits of working collaboratively?
• How does the collaboration benefit your individual practice?
• How do you reach a consensus?
• How is the relationship equal?
• Why did you choose to collaborate?
• What do you want to achieve through the collaboration?
• What are the issues/problems of collaboration?

Documenting this information will provide a useful and interesting case study into collaboration and cross-cultural practice. How do two artists with very different practices and ways of working collaborate effectively together?