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Category : News

RESHAPE: Governance of the Possible

Over the past 2 years SSW Director Sam Trotman has been working with over 40 other artists/ cultural workers and 12 partners organisations from across Europe and the Southern Mediterranean in RESHAPE. RESHAPE aims to develop collaborative, bottom-up research that proposes ways to transition towards a fairer arts ecology with a specific focus on fair governance. Working in collaboration with Helga Baert (Direction – WPZimmer) and Martin Schick (artist and Cultural Manager bluefactory), informed by a wide range of artists, […]

Rock out 2020

This year, we won’t be doing our usual wrap up and review of the year. Instead, as 2020 draws to a close, let’s see it off with a bang. For everyone who wants to relive their heady days spent in the warm embrace of the foundry at SSW, we share with you Eden’s classic and improved Foundry Anthems*. If this isn’t enough to get you through the last few weeks of the year, we highly recommend the new album by […]

View from the Buck, near Lumsden in February 2019.

We are hiring: Programme and Communications Fellow

Applications for this role are now closed. Salary: £21,000, 1 year fixed-term Based on site at SSW in Lumsden, Aberdeenshire (relocation support available) Scottish Sculpture Workshop is looking for a Programme and Communications Fellow to work closely with the team, artists, project partners and our local community in Lumsden. This one year, fixed-term role is one of fifty placements across the UK supported by the Weston Jerwood Creative Bursaries (WJCB). The programme aims to make the arts a fairer and more […]

sketch for multi-headed puppet for several performers (2016), Gordon Douglas.

DIY 17: 2020 — That’s Governance!

That’s Governance! with artist Gordon Douglas invites participants to work together and propose a non-human candidate to hold a position on Scottish Sculpture Workshop’s Board of Trustees. Applying games and exercises in deep listening and roleplay with puppets, the workshop will encourage a playful response and challenge to the perceivably immovable conditions of governing. What can we achieve by heightening our grasp of organisational advice from non-human actors, and what can we complicate by attributing social purpose to phenomena as […]

Summer Residency (2019). Photo: Ki Dong Kwon

Open Again: September

From September 2020 we are pleased to reopen the SSW site for Courses and Open Access bookings in wood, metals and cold-casting. We have been working hard to put new measures in place to keep everyone safe. These include some physical changes to our workshops and some changes to how we work together across the site. All of our COVID-19 safety measures have been planned with reference to the Scottish Government guidelines and an understanding of our different users’ diverse […]

Image: Ross Fraser McLean / Studio RoRo

A wee update from Scottish Sculpture Workshop: May 2020

It’s been two months since we closed our site in Lumsden due to COVID-19. Like so many people, we have had to adapt how we live, work and communicate with each other during this time. With ongoing emerging information and shifting guidelines, we’ve worked on and then reworked our plans many times. As a team, we have set up a mutual aid group with our community in Lumsden, revealed the plans for transforming our workshops and had a remote ‘cake […]

Image: Sasha Saben Callaghan

Open call: Not Going Back to Normal

We’re proud to support Not Going Back to Normal, a project by Harry Josephine Giles and Sasha Saben Callaghan, produced by Collective. Together with Arika, Artlink, CCA Glasgow, Collective, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Glasgow School of Art and Project Ability we are commissioning a radical manifesto by and for disabled artists working in Scotland. Scroll down for Harry Josephine Giles’ and Sasha Saben Callaghan’s call for submissions and information about the project below. This information can be downloaded in doc, pdf […]

Architect's render of SSWArchitect’s render of proposed view into SSW yard from Main Street, Lumsden. Image: Collective Architecture

Planning application submitted to transform our workshops

Following our announcement of a major capital project in November 2019, we are excited to have recently submitted a planning application to Aberdeenshire Council detailing our proposed transformation of our workshops.  The plans, developed by Collective Architecture in consultation with SSW’s users and local community, will upgrade our facilities to create an improved, accessible environment for artists and local makers. This will include improved metal, wood and cold casting workshops, a new street facing community space, increased disability access and […]

A plaster head bathes in sunlight with tools surrounding it.Work by 2019 Summer Residency artist Sally Rickett. Photo: SSW

COVID-19: A message for our communities

This message was posted in March 2020. Read our May update here. A message for our communities: Due to COVID-19 we have made some changes to our planning and activity over the coming months in order to protect each other’s health while at SSW and more widely. Epidemics such as COVID-19 ask us to not only think about those we know, but also those we don’t know. We all have diverse circumstances, health and duties of care, and this situation […]

Winter Residents 2020: March

Over the last week we’ve been glad to welcome our second winter residency group of 2020, with artists Mhairi Killin, Anka Helfertová, Lili Huston-Herterich, Shona Robin MacPherson and Siân McIntyre. All artists responded to our Winter Residency call, which explores the muddy tensions between materiality and extraction within a time of climate breakdown. Here we share their plans for the residency period and an insight into their interests and practices. The second Winter Residency of 2020 runs from 2 – 30 […]