Lancaster Arts TEST Residency: On LAND 2025
Lancaster Arts is delighted to announce a programme of three TEST residencies: On LAND in 2025. Our TEST residencies are week-long, intensive opportunities for artists to further develop their practice, test out fresh ideas and work with new collaborators.
The first, in January, is with poet, writer and broadcaster Kate Fox, a regular contributor to Radio 4’s spoken word cabaret, ‘The Verb’, and author of several books, including "Where There’s Muck There’s Bras: True Stories of the North of England’s Women”.
She will collaborate with three academics from Lancaster University; Professor Deborah Sutton from History, Professor Liz Oakley-Brown from English, and Social Scientist and working farmer, Dr. Claire Hargreaves. This exploration will take the form of field trips, dialogue and creative activity, as well as time to reflect and develop ideas with input and provocations from the Lancaster Arts team.
Kate will be working with us to explore the theme of LAND through the intersection of neurodiversity and biodiversity, and the wider knowledge and interests of her academic collaborators.
Alongside the residency, we will bring artists, academics and community members with a specific interest or expertise in the subject area to explore LAND in a Creative Gathering, to broaden our thinking around the intersection of LAND and art.
If you would like to find out more about this residency and our ongoing exploration of the theme of LAND, please contact Creative Producer Alice Booth alice@lancasterarts.org.
What is Kate testing?
Kate says:
“I want to look at how making more explicit (and implicit) links between bio and neurodiversity across a particular landscape can contribute to articulations of neurodivergent identity and to the wellbeing of neurodivergent people.”
And
“I am used to translating my practice, poetry and performance processes for non-artists and non-researchers, but it will be really liberating to be able to articulate it to other artists and researchers and to collaborate with researchers thinking about landscape in different “languages” from me- and to in turn, translate or transform their languages back to them.”
We look forward to welcoming Kate and the academic team next week and seeing where our creative explorations take us!
About Kate:
Kate Fox is a poet, performer and writer whose main form of resistance against class, gender and neurodivergent shame and stigma is neuroqueer joy.
However, she grew up in Yorkshire where excessive word-use was seen as pretentious and a waste of vowels so her work contains a polyphonic symphony of tones and registers (and often not the word “polyphonic”).
So let’s just say Kate Fox is mostly known as a stand-up poet through her work on Radio 4 (as a regular contributor to spoken word cabaret “The Verb” writing and researching commissioned pieces on everything from octopuses to slime mould and the anniversary of “The Wicker Man”), through her comedy series’ “The Price of Happiness” and as Poet in Residence for several years on Radio 4’s “Saturday Live”.
Our second and third residencies on LAND have been awarded to multi-disciplinary artists Ellie Harrison and Lucy Wright, taking place in July and September 2025 respectively.
