Town Jewels is a six-month participatory arts programme led by Scott House Day Centre in partnership with Transported, to create a “necklace of jewels”: crafted, bespoke interventions around Boston co-curated with centre users, local residents, environment and community groups and Boston College students working with an experienced professional artist.
Scott House is a Lincolnshire County Council managed day centre for people with additional needs. They offer an ongoing programme of arts activity led by an in-house team, with a dedicated arts and craft workshop
The Town Jewels project aims to:
- Help the centre to contribute to the creative enhancement of the town’s smaller, often unseen, public spaces
- Offer opportunities to create crafted, bespoke interventions, using a range of artforms, materials and techniques that add beauty and interest
- Encourage people to engage and enjoy public spaces, our natural “gems”, around the town
- Bring together a range of partners to work collaboratively (Transported, centre users, neighbourhood action, health, and community groups)
- Link and recruit local residents, the Wildlife Trust and RSPB to bring specialist knowledge and professional artists’ creative innovation and expertise in teaching and empowering participants.
Transported have commissioned local Boston talent Jane Kay as lead artist. Jane has been involved in several collaborative art productions in the town, including the Fisherman’s Memorial with the Boston and South Holland Woodcarvers and the Dolphin Lane Heritage Mosaic with the Boston School of Mosaic. She plans to create the artwork with the Scott House centre users in through a mixed variety of mediums such as carving, ceramics and mosaic and looks to use recycled material as much as possible and has experimented with plastic bottle ‘bricks’.
Town Jewels will enable Day Centre users opportunity to engage with meaningful arts activity, to make a positive contribution to their wider community and to embed this in the Centre’s ethos and purpose going forward.
Scott House users have taken part in several “taster” projects with Transported over the last two years and want to embed creative activities within the centres ongoing programme, so users, staff and volunteers can increase their skills and abilities in a broad range of techniques, year on year.
Scott House also want to make the best use of the Day Centre’s dedicated workshop as an asset for the town, opening it up to support creative projects and groups and encouraging interaction between them and our regular users on a long-term basis, supporting lifelong learning and lifelong creative expression.
Where possible, activity to create the new artwork will take place on the site of its installation so passers-by can see the transformation of the spaces take place and take note of them. The hope is this will encourage future visits and ownership of caretaking by those nearby.
The project has received an Arts Council England grant of £27,000 and support of £1000 from Boston Borough Council through the Boston Town Area Committee in addition to contributions from the project deliverers Lincolnshire County Council and Transported.
