Based in Bristol, Situations works nationally and internationally, commissioning artists to make cross-disciplinary, site-specific and participatory work. It is led by director Claire Doherty, who founded Situations in 2002, and has a core team of six; as many as 20 additional producers and technicians are hired on a per-project basis, depending on the scale of delivery. Turnover can reach £700,000, of which Situations receives £85,000 from ACE as a National Portfolio Organisation. The rest of its income is built up through grants, trusts and foundations, and earned income including consultancy fees and fees charged for partnership projects with specific organisations, which contribute to overheads.

Mission: unlock potential and new perspectives for people and place

Situations began as a public art commissioning programme, but just as the scope of its activity has expanded – from working primarily with visual artists, to working with artists across disciplines, including music and performance – so has its relationship to the words public art. As Claire Doherty says: “We try and do everything that conventional public art doesn’t: we support art that grows out of place, and which unsettles preconceived ideas about place rather than confirming the status quo or a dominant story.”

Its mission looks in two directions simultaneously: for the public, the aim is to offer “different perspectives of a place”, through work that is “visually compelling”, and usually has “a very strong offer of a call to action to people that encounter it – that could be participants or visitors”. While a more industry-focused objective is to inspire new producers and artists in each place: “We often work in areas of low cultural infrastructure, so we try to build the skills in those locations.” This dual role is particularly visible in Bristol, its home city, where: “we play a civic role not only in the projects we produce, but as a connector: we’re part of the cultural ecology here, supporting young artists and young producers. It’s about galvanising the city: we have advised on the city’s public art policy, and we lobby for public art funds to be used in a more valuable way.”

A snapshot of activities

A sketch of how Situations works with place emerges through looking at three particular commissions:

1: Local – Bristol

Sanctum, created with Theaster Gates in 2015, installed a temporary structure inside the ruin of Temple Church, which had been closed for 75 years. It illustrates three key points about how Situations works:

i: It disrupted time: Gates wanted the programme of music performed inside to be continuous, “sustained for 24 days, day and night, all live performance, all unannounced. The audience could come at any time, and very quickly it became a place that people wanted to go at 2am, or on their way to work.”

ii: It disrupted hierarchy: “We might start with an artist who’s very well known, like Theaster Gates, but then we try and amplify other creative voices, building a whole set of creative responses, films, written material, around the lead artist’s vision, in ways that allow a deepening of ideas.” Sanctum resulted in a programme of live performance that “shook up ideas about who gets to perform, because you’d have a world-renowned banjo-player handing over to a 17-year-old singer-songwriter, or a young garage band to a community choir”.

iii: Rather than target a particular community, Sanctum gathered a temporary community, “creating connections between individuals who find themselves to be involved in a congregation, witnessing or participating in something together”. Doherty particularly recalls how: “In the park around the church ruin live a number of homeless men who began to come into Sanctum on a regular basis. One of the men spoke about how it had changed his feelings of isolation: ‘because I am as welcome to come and hear what’s happening as anyone else, for the first time in a long time, I feel part of something’.”

2: National – Richmond Castle

Richmond Castle is an English Heritage site in North Yorkshire, and Refrain – created by young composer Verity Standen – demonstrates two further key points:

i: It responds to history: Richmond Castle was a site where 16 conscientious objectors to the First World War were incarcerated. Standen created “an immersive choral work that unfolded across the heritage site, filling the castle with contemporary voices, to bring the untold story of the objectors alive.”

ii: It offers participation opportunities: Standen worked with “20 untrained male singers from all over the north, many of whom had never sung in a public setting before. Some of them were ex-military personnel, one was a Methodist minister, so they had quite interesting responses to the history of conscientious objection.”

3: International – New Zealand

Picking up on the theme of disrupting time, for the One Day Sculpture series in New Zealand Situations worked with 13 other organisations to commission 20 works, each of which “lasted for only 24 hours. The idea behind that was to shake up this idea that public art is there for ever.”

Oblique impact

Doherty’s sense of the impact of Situations’ work has been influenced by the AHRC Cultural Value Project report published in 2016, which argued that “these kinds of projects we work on address the issues that we’re now facing – economic uncertainty, climate change, etc – obliquely”, in the process creating “reflective individuals”. She describes this using two examples:

1: Sanctum was commissioned as part of the European Green Capital, but rather than address environmental issues directly, the project “questioned what sustainability might mean in terms of a city’s social connections, the opportunity it offers to people and its creation of a collective social imagination. Bringing about change does not necessarily happen through direct action in this kind of work, but by unlocking opportunities and catalysing new thinking in ways that are effective locally and which speak beyond the local specifics.”

2:  Nowhereisland was a project for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, which took place over eight weeks of the summer of 2012,. Situations worked with researchers from the University of Central Lancashire to compare the public response to Nowhereisland one year after its visit to the small town of Ilfracombe in north Devon, in comparison to Damien Hirst’s permanent public sculpture, Verity, installed in Ilfracombe shortly after. “What emerged from this groundbreaking new evaluative method was that while a permanent public artwork was perceived to have been beneficial to the town economically, a temporary cultural project which unsettled a sense of place and encouraged broader thinking about citizenship and welcoming outsiders offered deeper and more profound opportunities for transformative impact in attitudes and behaviour.”

Nowhereisland was typical of Situations’ ability to unsettle a community in a positive way, through presenting work that is: “unfamiliar and challenging. What tends to happen through an unsettling is that it encourages self-awareness and a consideration of the relationship to place. Reflective individuals, the UCLAN researchers suggest, are more likely to volunteer, more likely to vote, more likely to want to have a voice in their community, and more likely to have curiosity about other people.” The difficulty for the organisation is tracking these transformations after a project is complete.

Challenges

Other challenges relate to funding and skills:

1: Conservatism in a time of scarcity

Although lack of funding can be a barrier, Doherty feels it’s “as much about how the money is used as it is about increased competition for funding”. She has been leading Situations through the economic crash and the implementation of austerity policies and says: “It’s become much, much harder to convince people to do something ambitious, because resources are so much tighter, and often that’s when the conservatism of local authorities kicks in. What we do is risky, and that’s very hard, because you can see the potential. Often I say to people that we’re working with locally: don’t give up on doing things differently, because actually the results will be hugely significant locally.”

“It’s become much, much harder to convince people to do something ambitious, because resources are so much tighter, and often that’s when the conservatism of local authorities kicks in.”

2: The need for flexible skills

Prior to setting up Situations, Doherty worked at the Ikon gallery in Birmingham, where “all the curators had the same title and we all worked across gallery exhibitions, education and engagement on off-site projects”. This background has influenced the way in which Doherty considers the skills required by producers working in specific contexts. “There is an increased interest in curating and producing nationally, but we need to see the support and development of producers who are able to balance creative direction, project and financial management, and local engagement. Producers working in public contexts also need the resilience, charm and negotiating skills to overcome additional challenges on the ground.”

“Producers working in public contexts also need the resilience, charm and negotiating skills to overcome additional challenges on the ground.”

What next?

Since the interview for this case study took place, Doherty has been announced as the new director of the Arnolfini in Bristol. At present the future for Situations is under consideration, but it is likely that its commitment to skills development will continue to be at the forefront of the organisation’s mission.