unLab – Round 1

This award has now closed – see unLab Round 3

up to £5,000

(a maximum of 2 awards in Round 1)

For many years, a major part of our process in making new work was to ‘retreat’ – to find somewhere remote where we could escape from the daily pressures of our lives and other projects and just be together. Mostly this would be a week together where we would cook for each other, eat together, walk and talk, share films and books and articles and essays. It was time for us as artists to dream, to share and interrogate ideas at the earliest stage of their infancy, to begin the process of imagining what we might make next. We actively refused to set any outcomes in advance. Which annoys funders. Because they want to know “WTAF are you ‘artists’ actually going to do with this money?”. But a lot of the time we couldn’t answer that question. Because we didn’t know yet. Because we hadn’t had any time together to imagine that. So we earned cash from other projects to create this time to spend together. We came away from that time refreshed, excited and closer to each other as friends and artists and with exciting plans for what we would do next. This was our ‘laboratory’. We called it unLab.

This award is for artists at any stage of their career working within an arts producing organisation to retreat and begin to imagine their next project. Please do not apply for support for projects that are already in progress or have been through any development process.

The deadline to submit an application is midnight 31 January 2024. Successful awards must be spent and accounted for by 31 October 2024.

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Outcome

In 2024, we awarded Mad Friday Productions and Polite Rebellion unLab funding.

Mad Friday Productions is a vibrant arts collective born in the heart of Doncaster. Founded in 2021 by co–artistic directors Danielle Phillips & Lauren Townsend, childhood friends united by a passion for championing Yorkshire–based artists and narratives.

unLab funded a rural retreat to lay solid organisational foundations. Supported by an external creative consultant, the artists came away with a refreshed mission and values, a 10-year plan and a new understanding of eachother’s needs and working styles. It provided invaluable time to explore plans for two new projects.

Polite Rebellion (formally The Grief Series) is a disabled–led company based in Leeds, led by Artistic Director Ellie Harrison, Matt Rogers, Bethany Wells and Jen Watts along with a wider team of regular collaborators. Polite Rebellion is radically gentle. Playfully subversive. In an age of relentless noise it dares to be boldly quiet. It needs to be both beautiful and useful.

They create spaces to listen to untold stories and amplify people’s voices. They see creating beautiful spaces as being an emotional accessibility ramp into difficult conversations that bear witness to people’s lived experiences. They push back against the hurry sickness of contemporary culture to go slow, notice the detail and recognise that rest can be an act of protest.

unLab enabled a week away in an accessible workspace to interrogate their artistic practice, mapping out a new project landscape across a spectrum of disciplines. The team honed in on new project ‘Iconic Fatigue’ about chronic illness, which was later the subject of their successful unLock grant application.