Negotiating the cultural politics and poetics of identity within the Creative Industries of South West Britain.

This project aims to explore the relationships between place and identity as they are negotiated by the creative makers, arts institutions and governance organizations in the South West. We place value on understanding the cultural practices and experiences of creative making within a regional context. To this end we are talking to a series of governance organizations, arts institutions and practitioners from across the region. This is a three year project (2007 – 2010) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Background:

The project is focused on the South West. We are interested to explore the region from the points of view of both creative makers and arts governance organisation. We understand creative making broadly as defined by the DCMS thirteen areas of creativity and we foresee that as the project progresses we will narrow down the number of industries that we focus on. Through our discussions with creative makers, arts governance organisations and institutions across the region we aim to consider the following points:

• The interaction of these three groups across the region.
• The conceptualization and imagination of the region and its identities.
• To trace biographies of creative making and makers in South West.

We are especially interested in investigating:

• The effect of the changing territorial boundaries of the South West and the region’s diversity.
• The different strategies that the Governance organisations use to think through the region (e.g. language, terminology etc.) and their effects on creative makers.
• The relationship between creative practice and a sense of the ‘South- West’.
• The art historical heritage of the region.
• The problems of territorially-bounding the creative industries within the South West