Author Archives: Sarah Butler

More Than 100 Stories

My commission to creatively respond to Arts Council England’s Creative People and Places project continues. I am working with visual artist Nicole Mollett, and we are both blogging regularly on the Creative People and Places website.

‘Building Whilst Flying’ by Nicole Mollett

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Growing | Cooking | Sharing

Project Name: Growing | Cooking | Sharing
Dates: December 2014 – December 2015
Place: Breightmet, Bolton
Partners: GUILD HQ and Bolton at Home  – part of the Social Housing Arts Network

box sm2I come for lunch and find you have cooked up a feast – enough for ten of me. I can taste your kindness in each dish – rosecoco beans, hot puri, peas. Continue reading 

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Unpicked:Restitched

Project name: Unpicked:Restitched
Date: June 2015-February 2016
Place: Stockport
Partners: Arts and wellbeing charity, Arc, and textile artist, Julie Mosley

viaduct

 

Night-time, in this unslept-in town. Skateboarders in the square, repeating themselves across the paving slabs. A handful of drinkers, hunched over quiet pints. A woman grinding her cigarette underfoot. Streetlights cast their yellow haze across empty streets. And in the car park, amongst the concrete pillars and fluorescent lights, the car-mods come, show off their latest trick, admire the tuning of another’s engine, the flash of silver alloys – all that time spent oil-slicked, forehead-scrunched, turned to pure gold.

Continue reading 

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Stories From The Road

Project Name: Stories From The Road
Dates: Spring-Summer 2015
Place: Oxford Road, Manchester
Partners: Cities@Manchester

 

There are no lines telling you where it starts and where it ends. So let’s draw them in. Two trails of coloured chalk across the tarmac. Here: from park to shops. Here: from library to hotel.

Continue reading 

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Walking The Edge, Didsbury

Project Name: Walking The Edge
Dates: 22-26 June 2015
Place: Didsbury, Manchester
Partners: Didsbury Arts Festival

river sm

We know the road is coming – it beats the sound of running water – but it is still an assault, a right-angled twist up into concrete, railings, a different kind of sky. Continue reading 

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Stories From The Road

I am very excited to be collaborating with cities@manchester on Stories From The Road, a project mapping Manchester’s Oxford Road through individuals’ stories. The project is now live, and more stories will be added over summer 2015.

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Re/Place

Project Name: Re/Place
Dates: April-May 2015
Place: Chorlton, Manchester
Partners: Words and Fixtures; Chorlton Arts Festival

Not so much a graveyard, as a tunnel of space in between the green and the pub with a path of gravestones laid from one end to the other. The hard voices of afternoon drinkers nursing pints and fags bleed over the back wall. Birds chirrup and cheep and shit their berry-heavy lunches across the grass and the worn grey stones.

Continue reading 

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Re/Place: New Writing Commission

On Wednesday 20th May I’ll be reading a new commission, inspired by St Clement’s Churchyard, alongside five other fabulous Manchester writers.

7.30pm @ PROOF, Manchester Road, Chorlton, Free entry

Part of Chorlton Arts Festival.

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Walking The Edge, Didsbury Arts Festival 22-28 June 2015

I am thrilled to have been awarded a commission by Didsbury Arts Festival.

mapEvery day, 22-26 June, I will be walking the outer ward boundary of (East and West) Didsbury, uploading a new short piece of writing to the festival website at the end of each day. Following road and river, I will stick as close to the mapped boundary as possible and consider the relationship between the line on the map and the physical lived experience of the place. I will invite a range of people to join me along the way and there will be two walks open to all.

Keep an eye on the Festival website for walk details and new writing.

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Social Housing Arts Network

I am really excited to have been appointed to work on a long-term socially-engaged art project in Breightmet, Bolton. In collaboration with housing provider, Bolton@Home, I will be working with existing women’s groups and newly arrived families.

The project is led by GUILD and is the first of four projects which will make up the Social Housing Arts Network.

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