Artists

Colliding Lines works with a small group of artists over long stretches of time rather than commissioning widely and moving on. Associates come to us from music, dance, poetry, printmaking and sound art, and most of them work across at least two of those at once — which is exactly the kind of practice that has nowhere obvious to go.

An association usually runs for one to three years. In that time we produce the live work, publish whatever print or recorded object comes out of it, put the artist in front of the audiences and venues on our touring network, and handle the parts of the job — budgets, contracts, funding applications, technical management — that quietly stop good projects from happening. Authorship stays with the artist throughout.

What an association looks like in practice varies more than we expected when we started it. For one artist it has meant three studio periods, a touring show and a cassette edition; for another, a single object that took eighteen months to get right and a radio commission on the way. We do not run a fixed programme with milestones, because the work that interests us tends to change shape halfway through and a fixed programme would only punish that.

What stays constant is the support underneath: a producer who knows the project, space to make and test the work in front of a small audience before it is finished, a technical team who have seen the awkward version and are not alarmed by it, and a route into print or onto tape at the end so the piece survives the run. Artists keep their rights, their fees are agreed in writing before anything starts, and the documentation belongs to them.

New associates are taken on rarely, either by invitation or through a named call. Everything currently open is listed on the Open Calls page; if you want to propose a project outside of a call, the routes in are set out under Work With Us. Past and current productions are on the Productions page, and the published editions that came from them are under Publication.