Cultivating spaces for extraordinary artists
Anne Forgan
Anne Forgan joins the DASH and CVAN West Midlands team as Project Manager for Creative Workspaces: A Research Project & Action-led Report for Birmingham.
Anne is a producer, project manager and artist based in Coventry. She has over thirty years experience of devising and producing collaborative projects and events across arts, craft, heritage and technology sectors.
Anne’s work has had a consistent commitment to place and has frequently involved working with artists and communities to explore and celebrate aspects of a location. She has worked in sites as varied as a former slaughterhouse, an Ikea showroom, a cemetery and a medieval weavers house. She has been involved in organising a mass tree climbing event, a banquet in a disused industrial unit, an exhibition in a train station and a performance on canoes on Coventry canal. Working in unconventional spaces has given Anne a gritty determination to find ways to make good things happen and the ability to negotiate and make friends with unconvinced officials.
The Creative Workspaces project really resonated with Anne and will give her the chance to support some much-needed research into the needs of visual artists for accessible space.
She is interested in how spaces can be made sustainable for artists providing long term solutions.
I’m very pleased to have the opportunity to work with DASH/ CVAN West Midlands family as I really value the work that both organisations do to build a sustainable visual arts sector in the region. I’m looking forward to supporting a project that will provide robust evidence of Birmingham’s creative space needs and ideas for new solutions of addressing them.
Anne has a long held connection with Birmingham; in 2009 she studied an MA in Contemporary Curatorial Practice at BCU and has ongoing connections with some of the media and arts organisations, as well as practitioners in Birmingham.
Anne is a trustee of Coventry Artspace - an artist led studios and support organisation in the city and is hopeful that the learning from Creative Spaces may be relevant to artist-led organisations across the Midlands.