Work/Leisure_4 is inviting emerging and mid-career artists to create new work in 2024.

Across three previous iterations, Work/Leisure has delivered 9 short-term, non-prescriptive artist residencies, enabling artists to research and develop new work in the historically and culturally unique location of Blackpool, UK.

Work/Leisure’s first iteration (2016) sought to address Blackpool as a site where ‘work’ and ‘leisure’ are intricately linked. Its 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. The third iteration, delivered in the context of the a-n Assembly Blackpool: The Coast is Queer (2021), continued a non-prescriptive and fully inclusive approach, platforming the artist and the work as Blackpool continued to move closer back to normal.

This fourth iteration of Work/Leisure, invites artists to Blackpool during key phases of the town’s tourist season – Summer and Autumn – to research and develop new work at Abingdon Studios (ABS), using the studios and project space as a base from which to evolve new ideas into new forms. This new iteration considers flow, transience and the congregational qualities that connect the coast and the city; the networks in which ideas of ‘work’ and ‘leisure’ may manifest and play out.

Applications will be assessed by a 5 person selection committee comprising; Garth Gratrix and Tom Ireland (Abingdon Studios’ Directors), Paulette Terry Brien (Curator, Grundy Art Gallery) and KeeHong Low (Creative Director, Factory International).

---