Artist Brief: Creative approaches to Suicide Awareness

We are recruiting an artist in residence with an excellent socially engaged practice to co-create a scalable artwork with communities in Redditch. The successful candidate(s) will work at mental health and wellbeing partner venues who support people in the community with lived experience of suicide.

The artist in residence will work with people to elicit ideas in conversations or workshops to inform the artwork and/or may use creative work produced in the sessions in the final piece.

This is a new piece of work and builds on a body of creative health co-created work that the partners have delivered previously.

We have no expectations about artform and the type of artist, collective or practitioner we would like to commission. We are interested in hearing from a variety of practitioners to deliver this commission that could include but are not limited to:
Photographers
Spoken word artists or poets
Sculptors
Visual artists
Designers
Drama or theatre practitioners
Dancers

The commissioned artist will be expected to undertake suicide awareness training which will cover use of language; the training is given in-kind to the project but applicants should designate half a day of artist time in the budget to cover this training. All workshops will be supported by a mental health practitioner and the commissioned artist therefore will not be expected to provide mental health support.

The final artwork must:
Increase awareness of the stories of people who have lived experience of suicide
Create new or add value to existing peer-to-peer networks in Redditch
Co-create an artwork that is scalable and useable after the project is delivered

In the handover, the artist will be expected to make recommendations to the partners about how this work can be scaled up, including suggestions around budget implications for a scaled-up iteration.

The Fee is £3,500 inclusive of workshop planning, delivery, creation, materials, any equipment needed and VAT.