Warwickshire: Our Spaces

A public art commission scheme across a county.

Warwickshire: Our Spaces sought to bring people together in the wake of the pandemic. Guided by an innovative commissioning scheme, 7 new public art installations were created for 7 towns & villages in Warwickshire.

Celebrating local spaces and platforming the role of cultural recovery…

Warwickshire: Our Spaces was commissioned by Warwickshire County Council using the Government's Getting Building Fund in 2020-2021. This project was designed to create paid opportunities for artists and designers to create functional interventions that would passively encourage community confidence in public spaces in the wake of the pandemic.

Working on behalf of Creative Giants, Sam developed a commissioning scheme that would demystify the process of working on complex public art projects and allow artists who might not normally have their work represented in the public realm to have access to the opportunity.

Through a process of collaboration with the project team, the client and local stakeholders, we developed a strategic project structure that would adeptly deliver on the project’s core objectives, whilst balancing procurement requirements and funding restrictions. This included contributing to a procurement tender for a fabricator that could deliver on the projects CDM requirements, as required by the client.

Responding creatively to the changing narrative of the pandemic, Sam created online resources including a playful community consultation survey, brief templates, hosted drop-in sessions and created multi-media project packs to be disseminated through a ratification process overseen by local authority officers and politicians.