What is Percent for Art?
Our Percent for Art team comprises two officers who are based in our Community Engagement Team and work across all areas of Bolton. Our arts officers work with residents, community groups, partners and other community stakeholders to develop socially engaged arts projects that help to improve our communities and benefit customers.
We commission appropriate artists or arts organisations, to work with the local community, and we manage the project from start to finish.
The Percent for Art service actively encourages individuals and community groups to get involved in schemes that can offer creative solutions to neighbourhood issues.
Ideas for arts projects can come from our neighbourhood teams and they will focus on specific neighbourhood priorities or be developed through conversations with community groups, partner organisations or other community stakeholders. Sometimes local arts projects are developed through wider Greater Manchester, regional or national networks or funding.
Our service also offers advice and guidance to our partners with regard to developing arts projects involving other social housing customers across Bolton. We have also been commissioned by partners to project manage a number of community arts and public / environmental art projects in Bolton.
Projects can be in any medium including visual arts, performance, music, crafts, digital art and film. They can take the form of arts based consultation, skills and confidence building projects, arts in health & wellbeing work, festivals and celebratory arts, as well as streetscaping and environmental arts projects designed to enhance the physical environment.
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2014 The Living Mural Project
Bolton at Home commissioned artist Adrian Barber, of Bigger Picture Arts, to work with asylum seekers and refugees from BRASS, a charity in Bolton who are ‘Befriending Refugees and Asylum Seekers’. Together they designed, painted and projected a 'living mural' into their activity space.
During the summer months of 2014, Adrian delivered a series of artistic workshops with participants. Many of whom spoke no, or limited, English and had experienced significant trauma.
Workshops began with simple mandalas that can be found all around the world. People were taught how to draw "the flower of life". This was followed by workshops exploring spin art (based on the participants flags of origin), the trumball tank technique, marble ink transfers and photography days out looking at architecture within Bolton. The workshops, countless conversations, sketches and research all culminated in the design of a beautiful mural.
All the creative output from the sessions was brought together in a mural design that aligned with the many religions and cultural backgrounds of the participants involved. The mural has a static day time look and illuminates into life after dark, incorporating all the participants artwork into a moving and living wallpaper.
Click here to view the Living Mural