The Mutual Affinities Learning Lab is a Scotland based programme run by Creative Scotland and Counterpoints Arts that aims to listen to artists in Scotland who have first-hand experience of displacement. The Lab enables the selected artists to sustain and develop their practice in conversation with invited arts and community organisations located and working across Scotland. Deveron Projects hosted Mutual Affinities for a workshop in Huntly, where the artists and folk from Counterpoint Arts also joined us for Friday Lunch.
Åine O’Brien (Counterpoints Arts), Isabel Lima (Independent artists and researcher) and Stuart Cameron (Creative Scotland) will talk through the impetus and ideas behind Mutual Affinities (and why it was initiated as a pilot programme), together with the work of Counterpoints Arts Learning Lab. Isabel Lima will share a specific community-based socially engaged art project (co-commissioned by Counterpoints Arts) called Gresham Wooden Horse set in the Gresham area of Middlesbrough.
Gresham’s Wooden Horse is a project initiated by Isabel Lima, bringing together disparate communities living in Gresham, Middlesbrough. Many of Gresham’s terraced houses have been demolished or boarded up in recent years. Its population is diverse yet social deprivation discourages local people from finding mutual commonalities and with different communities rarely interacting. Against this backdrop, Gresham’s Wooden Horse has initiated an informal forum for cultural exchange – for old and new Gresham residents to establish a sense of ownership of their neighbourhood.
