About

Deveron Projects is a socially and politically engaged arts organisation deeply embedded in the rural town of Huntly, Aberdeenshire.

We make collaborative and place-based artworks that build social movements, realise self-determining communities and tangibly intervene in the complex and urgent issues impacting our town. Working in public, we meet people where they are, in their everyday.

Making art, for us, takes any form – youth groups, films, meals, walks, woodlands, community hubs, performances, gardens and more. Artworks emerge through conversation, listening, learning and imagining together with artists and communities, guided by our values, and in connection with other places and communities across the world.

You can read more about our programme here, our approach here, and our values here.

/ part of an ecology

We understand that people, with all their differences, make our organisation and the work that we produce. Our years of projects and research exploring the environment and more-than-human world have shown us that Deveron Projects is part of an ecology – an interconnected system of relationships between people and our wider environment, who come into community around, within, and as a direct result of our work. These communities can be short lived, such as around a specific event, or they can be long-standing for months, or even years.

Events in recent years have reinforced the importance of communities locally, nationally and internationally. A strong community of place offers friendship, quality of life and wellbeing, knowing your neighbours, caring about the place you live in and being able to work together through problems and challenges. Communities of identity offer belonging and solidarity through shared experience, histories and cultures. Communities of interest offer exchange, learning, conversation and skills development. These categories aren’t exclusive – we are all part of multiple communities, simultaneously.

As we explore through our COMMUNITY programme strand, despite nostalgic connotations of rural community, the lived experience and reality is much more complicated, challenging and joyful. Building communities and their capacity in Huntly, connected internationally, is the basis for alternative and sustainable futures with our town.

/ lifetimes

Deveron Projects will be 30 years old in 2025 – a lifetime, or longer for many of the young people we work with. Some of the community members who participate, collaborate and engage with our work have been a part of our communities for decades – they have seen the organisation grow and change for longer than our team.

Long-term relationships are mutually beneficial and essential within a small rural town of 4000 people. Strategically, we aim to build pathways into, through and between our programmes to sustain long-term connections with community members. This helps build a skills and knowledge base within the town, while continuing to invite and instigate engagement and participation for new community members, particularly those who are historically underrepresented in our work. Between 2022-2024, 14.3% of participants participated in our programme for the first time. We have found that 84% of people who come along to an ‘entry-point event’ such as Friday Lunch or a garden workshop state they are ‘more likely’ to attend another event. Those who participate in more than one regular event are most likely to collaborate with an artist, apply for job roles, or become part of a programming or care team.

Our programme is built to meet people’s needs, desires, capacities and identities as they change over time, from life stage to life stage. By getting involved at Deveron Projects, you are invited to do so as much or as little as you like, for as long or as short as you like, and can be confident that we are working to meet your needs, even if these change.

/ giving time

We allocate staff time, expertise and resources to support events, endeavours, meetings and activities by other groups, organisations and individuals in Huntly, beyond our core programme. In the last year, for example, this has included participation in partner organisation’s family days, at schools presentations, supporting conflict mediation between local groups, offering workshops to local universities, giving talks at local learning initiatives and more.

We receive public funding for our work so want to fairly distribute the resources, skills and expertise this supports widely within our communities, supporting us all to thrive and make the changes that we need here in Huntly.

/ communities of practice

We actively build and participate in communities of practice, fostering a generous and collaborative approach to sharing knowledge, experience and learning around our work, here in the UK and internationally. In committing to regular network development meetings (online and in person), hosting visits or residencies for networks and partners to Huntly and contributing to research we build communities of support, critique and mutual exchange, that stimulate innovative best practices for all involved.