Glossop Creates has confirmed its third PAIRINGS residency with local artist, Sarah Males.  

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The PAIRINGS residency programme, curated by Glossop Creates Director, Claire Tymon, invites artists to research and develop ideas related to issues that are important and interesting to the wider community. The artists are encouraged to use their creative skills and practice, while creating high quality, locally relevant work that opens doors to Glossop's cultural heritage and provides alternative perceptions of Glossop by focusing on it's assets from interesting angles.  

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Two of the three residencies have already been paired, with local creatives Richard Knox looking at the Town Hall and Lauren Riley using Glossop's rich textile heritage as her topic.  

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‍Art, nature and community engagement  

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Sarah will look at nature and the landscape as the topic for her project, drawing on the diverse and beautiful natural scenery around Glossop and the High Peak. This project is funded by the Glossopdale Community Wellbeing Programme Grant, administered by The Bureau, Glossop's Community Wellbeing Charity and volunteer centre. The Bureau's mission is to¬† identify and link together community needs and solutions to enable people to live independently and improve the quality of life for local communities. The organisation's resources, connections and values make this an enriching and exciting partnership for Sarah and Glossop Creates.  

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‍Nature table events and workshops  

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Sarah plans to create a "nature table" as a focus for her research, in which participants will be asked to reflect on, record and reconsider their relationship to nature and biodiversity. The project will inspire a series of events and workshops which will use creative methods to engage participants with the nature table, which will display leaves, twigs, fossils, plants and bones. A display of Sarah's findings will be exhibited at KIN.DER and be documented in a future KIN.DER zine.  

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‍Art and environment  

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Sarah is a socially engaged arts practitioner, concerned with creative engagement with place. Her artistic practice is driven by a passion for the environment; our natural and our built heritage. Using a variety of creative media to explore our relationships with the world, her work is underpinned by principles of social ecology, a philosophy that recognises that our health and wellbeing is dependent on our interconnectedness with our surroundings. To Sarah, creativity enhances, enlivens and activates these connections. All of her work is collaborative and socially engaged, locating value in the process that creates the artwork.  

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‍The importance of biodiversity  

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Sarah commented: "I'm very very excited by this opportunity to develop my practice, and pleased to be part of the Glossop Creates initiative. Whilst I have been a socially engaged artist working with people and communities to celebrate and engage with their natural, cultural and built environment for many years, the PAIRINGS nature residency will provide me with a unique opportunity to try something new. I want to explore ecolinguistics as an art form, considering and reflecting on the use of language and stories we tell about our world. Local biodiversity is so important, and the loss of these natural environments is a global, national and local issue that threatens our health and wellbeing. The project will enable me to explore the notion of how we perceive our natural environment."

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Claire Tymon comments: "We were bowled over by Sarah's talent and enthusiasm and we absolutely loved her ideas for this project. We are keen to see what Sarah creates with the town's stunning natural landscapes as the topic, and expect Sarah to grow and develop her own practice by researching for this residency."

The Glossop Creates project was launched to the town and the wider public last December and, since then, it has been instrumental in several projects which champion and nurture Glossop's artistic and creative community. The PAIRINGS artist residency programme enables the artists to carry out deeper research that helps to celebrate Glossop's distinctive characteristics, heritage and communities. For each of the pairings projects, the artists are asked to create something - a public installation, body of research, an exhibition, a podcast, or a film for example - that will inspire different generations to connect with the town, whilst nurturing Glossop's creative community and develop future ideas for the place that we call home.

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