Reflecting on the Freelands Artist Programme

Taking place between 2018 and 2024, the Freelands Artist Programme (FAP) was a six-year project working in partnership with four organisations across the UK to support 82 artists. The Foundation provided grants totalling over £1.5 million to g39 (Cardiff), PS² (Belfast), Site Gallery (Sheffield) and Talbot Rice Gallery (Edinburgh), in addition to committing their own programming and resources. Across the six-year timespan, the programme shifted and evolved, responding to a series of unexpected challenges (a global pandemic, the increasing cost of living crisis, and ongoing political upheaval). Yet throughout, it retained its core ambition of providing artists with the structures they need to develop their practice, careers, and communities.

In 2016, Freelands Foundation commissioned a piece of research examining the landscape across the UK for emerging artists. Researcher Dr Nicola Sim interviewed a diverse range of artists, funders, educators, and leaders from arts organisations dedicated to supporting artists, and from these, a clear gap of provision for early career artists emerged, highlighting a particular need for stronger artists’ networks and fostering of peer-to-peer learning between artists. The research also concluded that there was a lack of opportunities for emerging artists practising outside of London, and that the organisations committed to this work in these areas were often under-resourced.

In response to this backdrop, it was clear that there was a growing need for a large-scale investment into the infrastructure for artists. The Freelands Artist Programme was designed to answer this call. There were three main objectives set out at the start of the programme. First, to support emerging artists in their creative and professional development, bolstering their local networks with other artists and arts professionals. Second, to support regional arts organisations in their collaboration with artists, developing best-practice approaches for engaging with artists, creating new public engagement programmes and enabling the overall development of arts ecosystems. And third, to sustain and strengthen arts ecosystems by attracting, developing and retaining talent – both artists and arts sector professionals – across the UK. Reflecting on the programme from this moment in time, in 2026, it seems many of these aspirations were met and the ripples of the programme can be seen and felt today.

The partnership of organisations for this programme was recruited through an open call, with an independent judging panel, bringing together those with curatorial experience of working with early career artists and artists practising in different locations and contexts. From this process, we selected four very different organisations, ensuring a geographic spread across the four nations of the UK. These were: g39, an artist-led space and community in Cardiff; PS², an artist-led project space and studio provider in Belfast; Site Gallery, a contemporary art space in Sheffield; and Talbot Rice Gallery, the public art gallery of the University of Edinburgh.

This range of organisational structure and scale was reflected in the programmes they developed. Each of the partners designed unique, independent programmes that responded to their own organisational models, their situation and the artists they were working with. For example, in Sheffield there was and continues to be a strong supply of studio spaces for artists, therefore Site Gallery focussed on creating opportunities for the artists to develop work for an in progress exhibition, with artists building relationships with a city-wide partnership of local arts organisations including Bloc Projects, S1 Artspace, Yorkshire Art Space and Museums Sheffield. Whereas in both Cardiff and Edinburgh studio space was an acute problem for artists so both g39 and Talbot Rice Gallery’s programmes centred on the provision of studio space and nurturing a community of practice between the artists and their organisations. In Belfast an investment into the infrastructure of artist development was at the core of their aspirations, and this programme created a curatorial role to provide bespoke support to the artists involved. 

To enable such an ambitious and diverse reach to the programme, there was a core structure that was retained across the lifetime of the project: each partner selected five artists per year to take part in a two-year programme with their organisation, with each artist receiving a £10k grant across the duration. Depending on which partner they worked with, the support artists received included studio space, workshops, mentoring, research visits, networking, social activities, access to academic and fabrication facilities, hosting exhibitions, and commissioned writing. The Foundation programmed the space between these distinct offerings, creating moments for artists from across the wider partnership to connect, taking the form of an annual symposium, an exhibition, and a publication, in addition to regular studio visits and monthly talks programmed by the Foundation’s Artist Development team. The programme combined educational and curatorial models, taking its lineage from alternative art schools well established in the UK such as Open School East, School of the Damned, and Syllabus. 

Both the Foundation and its partners found that at the end of the six years, the programme had evolved into something no one had imagined at its start.  

"The artists have shown me that there is no fixed direction of travel with a programme like this. If it is going to be peer-led, then it can, and does, react to individual concerns and to external influences." (Anthony Shapland, g39, in Old Land New Waters, 2021) 

As Anthony Shapland from g39 states in the quotation above, arguably the most important lesson learnt from this programme was that there is no one-size fits all solution to supporting artists.  

For the 2022 publication, Aggregate, I led a discussion with the partners reflecting on what had been learned thus far in the programme in terms of best practice in supporting artists. When unpicking this, Peter Mutschler at PS² made the following point, which demonstrates the difficulty in declaring with confidence what artist support had the most significance or had simply ‘worked’.  

"What I like about working with artists is that you can always think ‘that is why I did that’, but it’s not true – things kind of fall from the sky or the artists develop things themselves. To pick out what element actually assisted them, that will be a task for me to consider. Maybe it will be possible to pin down something more specific or concrete at some point. It will be different for everybody – there is no one recipe. What I like about our group here, the different partners on the Freelands Artist Programme, is that we have different approaches and we have different successes, or the same successes and failures, and maybe at the end we (will) see there isn’t one single route or ways of doing things." (Peter Mutschler (PS²), Aggregate, 2022) 

Though as galleries, arts organisations and funders we realise there is no singularity in how to design programmes to support artists, this programme gave the participating organisations the opportunity to test approaches, offering new ways of working or expand on established methodologies, and ultimately enabling them to build a practice which lives on beyond the boundaries of the programme. One staff member from PS² had stated, ‘Our organisation has far more competence and confidence, probably similar to the artists, and the debate and theme of artists’ support is now visible in many organisations here.’  

To return to George Vasey’s opening quotation, taken from commissioned writing he produced for the first FAP publication Old Land New Waters, 2021, it seems that whatever form it took, this programme provided four main ingredients for the artists participating: space, time, money and dialogue.

These then re-emerge during final interviews with some of the participating artists who reflected:

“I’ve had this prolonged period to produce, and that’s been really helpful because there’s so much encouragement and so much confidence boosting and it’s not just at the beginning, it’s along the way, as everyone’s talking about their work and making creative connections.”

“I’ve started to find that I actually work in this medium. And my work is always about these themes. And now the next work will just be a continuation of that. Whereas before I was always just taking the commissions I could get, so was always moulding the work to someone else’s public programme or some theme, so I could never have the time to build my own understanding.”

“I mean, literally just to be able to have a bit of financial security or space to be focusing on just making your work. It’s quite a dream situation to be in.”

“I definitely feel like I know more people and maybe that network of professional contacts is wider. I just feel like more people know about my work or the kind of work I want to make.”

In the final FAP publication, Betwixt, 2023, staff working across the programme returned to this subject matter, with the added weight of learnings from five years of programming amassed. One of the Foundation’s curators at the time, Wingshan Smith, led a workshop which was then transformed into a series of illustrations by artist Sarah Taylor Silverwood. Artistic Community: Sedimentary Diagram (Incomplete) imagines a cross-section of strata, instead of layers of rock, conglomerate, and soil compacted by thousands of years, the drawing shows the elements of artist development alive today. Words such as ‘resilience’, ‘caring’, and ‘adaptable’ swim alongside ‘stretched’ demonstrating the precarity many artists continue to face. The largest section is ‘belief’, which arguably if you were to pick a single word to encapsulate this programme that is it. We believed in the artists and in turn they believed in themselves.  

This nurturing of an artist’s belief in themself is also highlighted in Site Gallery’s contribution to the Lexicon of Artist Development, as part of FAP publication, Unchorus 2023. They define ‘belief’ as a ‘confidence’, ‘an artist’s ability to appreciate and talk about their practice in an easy and comfortable way, to stand by their own ideas and have faith in their capacity and way of doing things.’

Reflecting on this programme after a pause, its value remains evident with many learnings for both the artists and organisations. For the participating artists this takes form in understanding the value of mentorship; creating and withholding their own boundaries and knowing their own limitations; the significance of making the work they want to make; investing in growing their networks and relationships, particularly with peers; the value of having a studio space and being comfortable with using that as a place for non-making aspects of their practice; and perhaps, most importantly, encouraging yourself to stop worrying about what others are achieving.

For the organisations managing these programmes, they understand better their own organisational limitations and opportunities; recognise the need for pastoral care of artists and accessibility to be central to any artist development work; value connecting to peers across the UK and learning from both similarities and differences; and, finally, accepting that you will get things wrong and there are many things that are unknown, yet from this you continue to learn and grow.   

These outcomes are as meaningful today as when the programme ended in 2023 and the challenges they respond to persist. Artists continue to work in a system that looks hugely diverse dependent on where the artist is based in the UK and many artist development programmes are under-resourced or, at worse, non-existent. There is an ongoing need for initiatives that bolster stronger artists’ networks and peer-to-peer learning between artists, creating opportunities for ongoing arts education for artists outside of formal contexts.

It is evident that interventions such as the Freelands Artist Programme work. Artists have gone on to achieve career successes on their own terms, some have had work acquired by national collections, several prizes won, and work selected for international biennials. Yet, it is the intangible metrics that are the most widespread and everlasting. For many of the artists more significant than ‘career highs’ are the communities built and relationships formed; the breathing space this programme afforded that has sharpened their practice and fostered their intellectual growth. Like a garden, an artists’ practice is not a sum of its outputs, but instead a love for the process of growing; an urge to sow seeds hoping for a better future and a belief in the cultivation of practice.  

The artists: Alaya Ang, Crystal Bennes, Kelly Best, Brown & Bri, Alice Briggs, Renèe Helèna Browne, Philippa Brown, Theresa Bruno, Jane Butler, Tom Cardew, Alison J Carr, Myrid Carten, James Clarkson, Kedisha Coakley, Rachael Colley, Mitch Conlon, Phoebe Davies, Janie Doherty, Freya Dooley, Aideen Doran, Ross Fleming, Yuen Fong Ling, Rebecca Gould, Michael Hanna, Maud Haya-Baviera, Jenny Hogarth, Jacqueline Holt, Jan Hopkins, Gail Howard, Susan Hughes, Dorothy Hunter, Rebecca Jagoe, Seiko Kinoshita, Julie Lovett, Maria de Lima, Rhiannon Lowe, Victoria Lucas, Sekai Machache, Zara Mader, Sulaïman Majali, Jasmin Marker, Phillip McCrilly, Jan McCullough, Tara McGinn, Emily McFarland, Emmie McLuskey, Tyler Mellins, Anisa Nuh-Ali, Rosie O’Grady, Helouise O'Reilly, Adebola Oyekanmi, Sadia Pineda Hameed & Beau W Beakhouse, Robin Price, Thulani Rachia, Will Roberts, Conor Rogers, Sarah Rose, Jonathan HS Ross, Kirsty Russell, Aled Simons, Rae-Yen Song, Eothen Stearn, Christopher Steenson, Zoyander Street, Tako Taal, Jennifer Taylor, Neasa Terry, Fern Thomas, Becca Thomas and Clare Charles, Lea Torp Nielsen, Rian Treanor, Lucy Vann, Adele Vye, Ian Watson, Thomas Wells, Jo Whittle, Siân Williams, Mona Yoo, and Matt Zurowski.

The staff: Edward Ball (Freelands Foundation), Flora Bui Quang Da (Talbot Rice Gallery), James Clegg (Talbot Rice Gallery), Colm Clarke (Talbot Rice Gallery), Caitlin Davies (g39), Stuart Fallon (Freelands Foundation/ Talbot Rice Gallery), Tessa Giblin (Talbot Rice Gallery), Meghan Goodeve (Freelands Foundation), Robyn Haddon (Site Gallery), Judith Harry (Site Gallery), Sam Hasler (g39), Rosie Hermon (Freelands Foundation), Ciara Hickey (PS²), Sharna Jackson (Site Gallery), Melanie Kassoff (Freelands Foundation), Alissa Kleist (PS²), Melissa MacRobert (Talbot Rice Gallery), Davy Mahon (PS²), Tanith Marron (Talbot Rice Gallery), Chris Mooney-Brown (g39), Jane Morrow (PS²), Cinzia Mutigli (g39), Peter Mutschler (PS²), Corinne Orton (Talbot Rice Gallery), Vira Putri (Talbot Rice Gallery), Anthony Shapland (g39), Nicola Sim (External Evaluator), Wingshan Smith (Freelands Foundation), Monika Stepanikova (Talbot Rice Gallery), Angelica Sule (Site Gallery), Henry Ward (Freelands Foundation), Catriona Whiteford (Freelands Foundation), and Ellie Young (g39).