Work/Leisure is inviting emerging and mid-career artists to create new work.

Across its two previous iterations, Work/Leisure has delivered 7 short-term, non-prescriptive artist residencies designed to enable artists to research and develop new work in the historically and culturally unique location of Blackpool.

Through this third iteration of Work/Leisure, Abingdon Studios is inviting artists to Blackpool during 2 key phases of the town’s tourist season – Spring and Summer – and looking to support 3 artists to research and develop new work at Abingdon Studios.

Work/Leisure’s first iteration (2016) sought to address Blackpool as a site where ‘work’ and ‘leisure’ are intricately linked. It’s second iteration (2020) occurred at a time of global pandemic and home or remote working, when boundaries between location, space and time had softened and the borders between work and leisure spaces and time were harder to define.

For this third iteration, Abingdon Studios, fresh from delivering a-n Assembly Blackpool: The Coast is Queer (2021), continues a non-prescriptive yet fully inclusive approach which platforms the artist and the ‘work’ as Blackpool continues to move closer back to ‘normal’.

Applicants will be selected by a 6 person selection committee comprising; Garth Gratrix and Tom Ireland (Abingdon Studios’ Directors), Paulette Terry Brien (Curator, Grundy Art Gallery), Marie-Anne McQuay (Head of Programme, The Bluecoat), Mariama Attah (Curator, Open Eye Gallery) and Kerry Tenbey (studio artist, Founder of Material Arts Network).

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The deadline for applications for Work/Leisure_3 has now passed. We will be announcing details of the successful applicants very soon.