Eight grants for artists to explore new technical or digital skills that might have a positive impact on their practice

 Tech Play Learn 


This opportunity is offering the below eight successful applicants dedicated, paid time to develop new skills and find new potential avenues for creativity with our support.

How it works

The artists have received a £1,000 grant to help cover their development time. Using a further £500 budget per applicant the team at TiM together with each artist identified the relevant technical kit best suited to the artist and their ambitions. The specialist equipment, ranging from audio/voice recording kits to Bi-naural recording kits and Ableton have been ordered and will shortly arrive with their new owners.
This initiative is self-directed and not about an output or end product. The team will be on hand to offer support throughout this exploration project and if content is naturally produced and artists want to share it, we will help with that too.

Peyvand

A London based Peformer-Puppeteer-Theatremaker.

Peyvand is excited to use this rare opportunity to make use of resources and time to experiment and expand on her puppetry practice into stop motion animation.

Recent work includes DUAL دوگانه (Vault Festival 2020 Show of the week Award Winner), Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran (Fringe First Award 2019) which previewed at Theatre in the Mill.

Little update! Since the commission, Peyvand has created her first stop motion animation film- watch it here.

Lanre

A director, choreographer & writer working across theatre and film.

Lanre’s work explores timely social and political issues, as well as the nuanced textures of human relationships.
The choreographer and performance artist for Dear Mr Shakespeare, which was selected at Sundance Film Festival 2017. He directed and choreographed FIGURE, which was selected for Aesthetica Film Festival 2018 and won Best Dance Film at New Renaissance Film Festival and the Audience Choice Award at Lights Film Festival (Toronto).

In 2019, Lanre was commissioned by Camden People’s Theatre to create his solo show ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM, which had a sold out run at the venue in April 2019, and was transferred to the Roundhouse in October 2019.

Shamica

An artist and arts educator with a background in cultural heritage.

Shamica is interested in dynamics of cultural hybridity and new subjectivities, in particular how they operate as modes of production, and can inform and alter methods of enquiry. She runs a collaborative project with artist and collaborator Anna Merryfield using cooking as a method through which to explore personal archives and complex shared histories. Collective gathering through sound, leisure and recreation are also important points for departure.

Yolanda

A Writer, Performer across Theatre and Screen.

Yolanda’s play Quarter Life Crisis led to the writer receiving critical success, the play was subsequently published by Oberon Books, transferred to London’s Soho Theatre (post the Underbelly Edinburgh fringe run), a restaging in Nigeria (2017 & 2018) and was commissioned for a radio adaption by the BBC. At present Yolanda is on attachment at Soho Theatre (Soho Six). Early 2020 will see Yolanda’s TV debut on Channel 4 with her piece called ‘BBW’.

” I have always been an audio fan, so when this fund became available I was super excited to learn a new skill. I am keen to play with using audio, to discover how I can tell a story that can be absorbed via audio storytelling. I will be using the time to learn how to record and edit audio stories. To skill up.”

Lydia

Dancer, Producer, Metalhead, Apocaloptimist, Kvlt.

Lydia is  a dancer based in Leeds that creates multi-disciplinary performance. Her practice is informed by a background in dance, live art and music.  This has led her to create work that provides a social commentary and contains elements from altered disciplines.

With this opportunity she will be developing her music creation skills using MAX, starting a one woman Black Metal project (instead of the usual one man Black Metal projects) but with a slight twist. Being trained in Flamenco and other traditional dance that is very percussive she will be experimenting with the possibilities of creating live looping soundscapes that are a reaction to her footwork

Sandra

A freelance visual artist and Co-Director of theatre arts company Eye of Newt.

Sandra began her career as an Art Teacher in schools, moved across to gallery education at Manchester Art Gallery and still enjoys working collaboratively with the public to create spectacular art works.
She works predominantly within the field of outdoor arts, making giant puppets, lanterns and costumes for parades, festivals and events. Eye of Newt are currently building “The Cabinet of Curiosity”, a piece of interactive street theatre full of puzzles to solve and stories hidden within cupboards, drawers and boxes.

Sandra will be using her Tech/Play/Learn time to explore ideas for interactive lighting and sound, starting with the absolute basics in electronics using Arduino tech. She’s also keen to investigate  how motion sensors might help audiences to play with the cabinet from a distance. This will be an entirely new field to explore and Sandra is looking forward to seeing where her experiments might lead.

Felix

A South London based artist working on projects that combine different audio mediums to create soundscapes and collages, for radio, installations and film. Felix’s work often explores the black experience and history through speech, environmental recordings, sound design and music. Previous work features include; the Young Turks radio show on NTS,  We The Curious museum (Bristol), The Jerwood Space (London) and The Jewish Museum (London).

Felix is looking forward to using this opportunity to explore how he can implement coding and game design into his practice, in order to create more interactive experiences and tell important and urgent stories in unique and exciting ways.

Irna

an ethnographer and writer.

Often using oral testimony to build narratives linking personal stories to broader social themes. She has curated several exhibitions and published books about the development of Britain’s South Asian diaspora heritage, including The Grand Trunk Road: From Delhi to the Khyber Pass.

Irna’s writing on the notions of love and marriage among British Muslim women has included documenting her own experience. Upcoming work is inspired by Irna’s extensive archive of interviews with several generations of her own family which she has collected over the last 25 years. She is excited to explore sound manipulation and how this new skill will benefit her practice.