iCCi Annual Report 2022

iCCi ANNUAL REPORT 2022

TOGETHER IN 2022…

65,000 PEOPLE ATTENDED OVER 1,000 EVENTS, INCLUDING 6,600 STUDENTS, AND 5,374 CHILDREN AND BABIES!

12,000 PEOPLE ENJOYED 170 ARTISTS PERFORMING AT BOING! 2022.

WE DELIVERED 387 CREATIVE SESSIONS FOR 4,054 YOUNG PEOPLE.

WE WORKED WITH 63 KENT AND MEDWAY SCHOOLS, AND PRESENTED WORK BY MORE THAN 250 ARTISTS.

WE PLACED 30 YOUNG PEOPLE INTO ENTRY LEVEL JOB OPPORTUNITIES ACROSS 14 DIFFERENT INDUSTRIES, AND HOSTED 17 WORK EXPERIENCE PLACEMENTS WITHIN OUR OWN TEAMS.

Cover image: GENFEST22 (@misterEB)

DIRECTOR’S UPDATE

It’s been another busy and exciting year for iCCi. 2022 saw us building for the future, with the development of our five-year plan with its six areas of focus (around which this report is structured) and the formation of our new Industry Advisory Board, who will help to drive this agenda forward.

We were successful in our first bid as iCCi to become an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation (NPO), securing funding for the next three years of our programme of work with children and young people

From our hub at Gulbenkian Arts Centre, we have delivered our county’s most ambitious and varied cultural programme, hosting hundreds of live events, film screenings, workshops and creative sessions for University staff, students and for our local community.

Within the packed programme, bOing! International Family Festival returned to full scale after the Covid pandemic, and we hosted an unforgettable residency by international punk-rock protesters Pussy Riot.

Our Creative Engagement team continued to deliver creative experiences for children and young people, through our industryleading ART31 programme and our work with local schools and, along with our extra-curricular Music Department, to thousands of students across the University. Reaching beyond our

The iCCi Industry Advisory Board

In March 2022, we announced the formation of our inaugural Advisory Board, bringing together a diverse range of experts from across the creative industries and including representatives from our ART31 programme and the student body here at Kent.

Co-Chair: Lizzie Hodgson Lizzie is a consultant and strategist, founder of ThinkNation and Nile and Chair of RE: Generation 2031.

Co-Chair: Mel Alcock Mel is Currently Chairman of the British Board of Film Classification, Mentor at Ascension Ventures, Vice Chairman of Cement Fields and Owner of the Complete Circle Consultancy Ltd.

Caroline Van Eldik Caroline is the Vice-President of Student Engagement at Kent Union, the student body for University of Kent.

Ray Mia A graduate of University of Kent, Ray is an immersive audio producer for Music, TV, Film & Audio Drama.

campuses, we were proud partners in Flux, a Kent-wide project looking at mental health issues in 14-25 year olds and we stepped up our leadership role in Medway, becoming chair of the Medway Cultural Education Partnership.

Creative Estuary has had an incredible year, delivering exciting artist commissions, providing new employment opportunities through Re: Generation 2031 and pushing forward the conversation around cultural placemaking at regional, national and international events.

We welcomed Dr Jim Ang as our Deputy Director. Jim has extensive experience in VR and AR, and is already shaping our research development, working with our Fellows and coordinating new research projects for the University around our themes of Creative and Cultural Education, Health and Wellbeing, Human-machine Creativity, Diversity and Sustainability and Creative Heritage.

The Docking Station, our new space for immersive digital technology, teaching, performance, innovation and research in Medway, secured over £5M in funding and we are well on the way to delivering this hugely ambitious project in 2025

All of this is only possible through collaboration with partners across the University and our region, and we look forward to a busy and exciting 2023 with you all.

Professor Catherine Richardson, Director of iCCi

Conrad Murray Conrad is Director at the BAC Beatbox Academy. He is a multi award-winning theatre-maker, writer, director, rapper, beatboxer, live looper and singer.

Sonia Nayyar Sonia is the Project Manager for Cohesion Plus, a local diverse led arts organisation based in North Kent.

Jo Nolan Jo is Managing Director at Screen South, a Kent based Cultural Development Agency.

Imogen Robertson Imogen is a creative producer and consultant based in Medway and the south east.

Sacha Wares Sacha is a critically acclaimed theatre director, who has worked for more than twenty years at the forefront of British new writing.

Nick Willis Nick is an artist and student who is passionate about arts opportunities for young people across Kent.

CULTURAL PLACEMAKING AND REGIONAL STRATEGY

Placemaking is at the heart of the University’s regional strategy – we aim to use our resources to make our region a better place to live and work – and iCCi’s contribution to this work is to think about it culturally.

Creativity is central to placemaking – through it, art and culture build pride in our places, help them to thrive and be healthy and raise their profile. As the recent LGA publication ‘Cornerstones of Culture’ puts it, ‘We need people and communities who can respond with creativity and innovation to the social, economic, and environmental challenges and opportunities facing us. We need places that are able to draw on their unique local heritage to develop resilient and inclusive futures. We need new diverse voices to bring fresh thinking to the table and iCCi has a significant role to play in that work’.

Creative Estuary

At the beginning of the year our partners Metal released Estuary festival’s final evaluation report which demonstrated that a total £6.5m of “new” money has been injected into the Thames Estuary region as a result of the festival. Work is now underway to develop the model for the next iteration of Estuary in 2025.

Our Creative Estuary Co-commissioning programme continued to develop opportunities for estuary-based artists and creative organisations to create ambitious new work with and for our communities. To date we have worked with 28 organisations, delivering 44 commissions and engaging 348 practitioners. With a commitment to invest at least 17% of our co-commissioning funds into black and brown led organisations, or for opportunities for black and brown practitioners, we are proud to have invested 24%.

Re:Generation 2031 continued to develop the next generation of cultural and creative leaders, delivering 30 paid, entry-level work placements and six new practice-based training programmes, enrolling 58 young people with 33 different organisations and practitioners.

To support and promote the talent and creativity across the region, we launched our Business Directory. Alongside this a wealth of rich new content has been developed for the website

and social media, including interviews profiling our Champions as well as guest blog posts and case studies on the Re:Gen 2031 programme and the impact of our co-commissions.

In May, we took the message of the value and importance of creativity and culture in high quality placemaking to the inaugural UKREiiF in Leeds and convened a national roundtable of developers, investors and cultural organisations. We shared our vision of harnessing the power of culture to drive the creative and economic evolution of the Thames Estuary and the write up was published in Property Week and The MJ

Also in the Spring we were invited by the Global Cultural Districts Network and by Samoa to speak at international creative industries festival Chtiiing! in Nantes. Another invitation from the Global Cultural Districts Network saw our Chair Sarah Dance give the opening keynote in Lugano at their annual convening.

We continue to lead the peer learning network for the first national cohort of Cultural Development Fund projects. There are useful synergies in our work for example the reuse and restoration of historic buildings within Grimsby Docks which relates to our work in Chatham and in other heritage locations across the estuary As a project with enquiry and testing at its centre, Creative Estuary is committed to learning with and from others.

Docking Station

The Docking Station project is now progressing at pace The Design Team, led by Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, were appointed in the summer of 2022 and will soon complete RIBA Stage 2 designs. These will reflect an exciting new design brief which outlines the detailed digital requirements of the project established in collaboration with Digital Consultants.

The technologies we are aiming to provide at Docking Station include virtual production, motion capture, volumetric capture and photogrammetry as well as pre- and post-production facilities, to ensure the full range of technologies required to create immersive digital experiences are available to our community of students, academics, creatives, local people and businesses. The studios will complement the community, co-working, teaching and office spaces that will be provided within the historic Police Section House that will undergo full restoration and refurbishment

Detailed design work (RIBA stage 3) will commence in January/February 2023 Two funding applications have recently been submitted to The National Lottery Heritage Fund (for £3.9M) and to the Cultural Development Fund Round 3 (for £3.5M), the results of which will be announced in March 2023.

We are working closely with partners at Medway Council including the Library Service, Learning and Skills Hub & Brook Theatre to ensure Docking Station is linked to these sites in Chatham to increase accessibility to a wide range of communities. Chatham Historic Dockyard Trust continue to play a key role in supporting the project in terms of site acquisition and the provision of expert heritage advice and we are liaising closely with Mid Kent College regarding the design of the new curriculum. Additionally, we have close working relationships with numerous Medway arts organisations and are keen to involve local artists and creatives in the development of the project.

© FCB Studios

Image above: Creative Estuary co-commission

© Artist EVEWRIGHT ‘Tilbury Bridge Walkway of Memories’.

Photography John Ferguson. Evewright Studio all rights reserved 2023)

STUDENT EXPERIENCE

Through our diverse artistic programme, our industry-leading ART31 project, our extracurricular music offer, and by working closely with divisions and departments across the University, we continue to offer thousands of students creative experiences each year.

Gulbenkian Arts Centre provides hundreds of events and film screenings per year with student discounts across much of the programme. In 2022 we sold over 5,100 student tickets to events, including our weekly 2 For Tuesdays cinema screenings, our annual freshers outdoor screening in September, and a series of free summer outdoor screenings presented in partnership with Kent Hospitality.

Student societies, schools and divisions also regularly hired Gulbenkian Arts Centre throughout the year to host their own events, including T24, MTS, Kent Dance, the Stand-Up Comedy Society as well as Arts & Humanities and CEMS.

ART31, our Creative Engagement offer for ages 13-25, provides free workshops and skills training throughout the year which are all open to Kent students as well as the general public. In particular our Gulbenkian Performance Company for ages 18-25 provided a safe, comfortable weekly space for students to try out performance techniques in a fun and welcoming environment, and our TECH31 & SCREEN31 workshops offered practical skills training working alongside professionals in technical theatre, live event production and filmmaking, as well as opportunities to put these skills into action on live events.

Gulbenkian Art Centre’s outdoor cinema

In June several students and graduates also took part in GENFest, ART31’s Youth Takeover Festival, showcasing young creative talent in Kent. Students and graduates showcased theatre performance, stand up comedy and film, as well as leading workshops.

For our Music Department, 2022 saw the resumption of the annual Colyer-Fergusson Cathedral Concert, which featured the University Chorus and Symphony Orchestra and soloists performing in the Nave, with two alumni amongst the soloists. April saw the Composer in Focus event with composer John Woolrich, working with the Orchestra and several piano Scholars, and the annual Summer Music Week festival in June closed the academic year featured a Music Scholars' Lunchtime Recital and the Saturday Gala concert amongst the events. The new academic year in September saw the appointment of a strong field of Music Performance Scholars and Award Holders, including two KMMS Performance Scholars.

2022 also saw the ten-year anniversary of the Colyer-Fergusson Building, marked in December with an Anniversary Weekend and continuing into 2023 with a series of special events, including the premiere of a department commission from Russell Hepplewhite and poet Nancy Gaffield (School of Creative Writing) in March as well as the Cathedral Concert. Music Donors, benefactors and supporters are being invited to events across the whole year as a means of engaging them in conjunction with the University Events Team.

Staff from iCCi have been involved in several teaching sessions in 2022, providing industry expertise on modules including Disability and the Arts and the Theatre Making MA course.

We hosted 2 x 30 hour placements for MA Theatre Making and Creative Producing students in spring 2023, plus a 15-day Arts Internship student. We also offered a two-week work placement to a Psychology undergraduate student and Olubunme Adeyeye, a Masters student from KBS did a work placement with us in June. We have also taken on three students as staff in the creative engagement team, via the University Work Study scheme.

Music Scholars and Award Holders

Our 2022 series of concerts launched in February, with our first-ever livestreamed Lunchtime Concert, as part of the series by one of our Music Performance Scholars, secondyear Michael Lam.

The recital saw Michael, in his second-year in the Kent and Medway Medical School, performing works by Bach, Mozart, Chopin and Schumann, and as well as welcoming a live audience, we livestreamed the recital online.

School of Arts lecturer

In 2022/23, 29 Scholars and Music Award Holders have been selected, drawn from a variety of courses across the University, including our new partnership with Kent and Medway Medical School (KMMS), and are taking a lead role in many of our extra-curricular ensembles.

Elia has loved working at the Gulbenkian this term and has felt he gained so much from the experience.

Michael Lam

ARTISTIC PROGRAMME

We continued to expand the scope and ambition of our live programme, which included the world premiere of Alice by Jasmin Vardimon Company in August and an unforgettable residency by Pussy Riot in September. We were successful in our bid for Arts Council England NPO status, securing vital funding for the next three years.

2022 started with alumni children’s company Little Bulb and Hibernation, coming to us off the back of a Christmas residency in the Opera House Linbury Studio. Popular and successful, we are in discussion with them about a future Christmas show (in competition with the Opera House sadly).

February & March were mostly occupied with a run of music, poetry & comedy (“final show” from US punk legends Pere Ubu; film & music events with Tom Robinson and Freedom Rd; John Hegley; Jenny Eclair, Jimeoin, Ed Byrne, Ian Stirling), plus we hosted a fascinating conversation with Nobel Prize winning writer (and University of Kent Emeritus Professor) Abdulrazak Gurnah.

The first major theatrical event came late March with the Gulbenkian debut of our Associate Artists BAC Beatbox Academy with their international hit Frankenstein: How To Make A Monster. Although ticket sales were undeniably disappointing, everyone who saw the show loved it and the word of mouth was sensational. Beatbox Academy will be back Christmas 2023 with their new show, The Pied Piper.

April saw the successful return of some old friends of the programme with Motionhouse (Nobody) and The Brodsky Quartet. In May we featured appearances by two different Associate Artists in markedly different forms of presentation: Aoi & Esteban, our digital artists currently in residence in the Historic Dockyard in Medway, brought back their ground-breaking VR performance WHIST to Colyer-Fergusson: returning to the venue where the work started at the end of a world tour to many of the major arts festivals and digital events.

And later in the month we presented the sublime, ethereal Ghosts and Whispers, a collaboration between Associate Artist John Woolrich and legendary film makers the Brothers Quay; a solo piano recital performed by Clare Hammond accompanying an hour-long commissioned work by the influential animators.

A suitably sublime end to the 21/22 season in the venues.

The major feature of the summer was, naturally, bOing! Back at full strength for the first fully-fledged post-Covid festival, this was our biggest Boing yet. With an estimated 12,000 people on the campus over the August Bank Holiday weekend and featuring the world premiere of Jasmin Vardimon’s Alice, this was a triumph

of a weekend and the high mark to reach for next year’s tenth anniversary.

Within what felt like days we were onto the launch of the 22/23 season We began the year with an exclusive UK presentation of Russian activists Pussy Riot and the latest iteration of their music/ theatre performance work RIOT DAYS An unqualified triumph, this searingly powerful, painfully topical work played to over 1000 people over several nights – over half of them first timers to the venue.

The music programme continued into the Autumn with a comprehensively diverse line-up of exceptional concerts: Penguin Café, John Woolrich, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Roger Eno, Joanna Macgregor, Maggie Nicols, Michael Gira and the Cowboy Junkies.

Pussy Riot (@MisterEB)

We hosted the culmination of the Estuary Sound Ark in an afternoon hosted by Matthew Herbert; presented the Gulbenkian debut of celebrated writer/ performer Shôn Dale-Jones and a sterling line-up of work for children and families (Joss Arnott’s The Tin Man; Peut-être’s The Dark; Motionhouse: Starchitects and Little Angel’s There’s a Rang Tan in my Bedroom). The calendar year ended with our Christmas show Under the Frozen Moon, from Half a String: ending the year with a children’s show created by an alumni company supported by the Gulbenkian. Full circle!

(A quick word on the cinema which continues to sit somewhere between “struggling” and “ticking over”: in common with the national picture, we still have not returned to pre-Covid levels but see peaks and troughs through the season – live cinema events (National Theatre etc) remain popular with our audience and we are experimenting with more “event”/ themed programming around film festivals and touring programmes – looking into more live concert film relays in the coming season).

Associate Artists: Aoi and Esteban

Aoi and Esteban are one of our iCCi Associate Artists. Based on our Medway Campus, they experiment with cutting edge VR and AR technology to create new work, and share this knowledge with an ever expanding network of artists and creatives.

Director, Aoi Nakamura explains:

“Since moving to the Central Boiler House in March 2022 we have engaged 76 creatives, artists, specialists, 437 participants, 6346 live audiences and our work has been seen by 157,867 people/audiences online, broadcast and in writing. We transformed Central Boiler House to a production ready house and launched A+E Lab (hub for digital and culture), we’ve grown company members and launched our virtual being Lilith. Aeon!

Our work 0AR and WHIST toured to five countries, our new productions’ R&D has taken place in the studio with dancers and composers, we are connecting to Medway local organisations, supporting 49 local, national and international artists to develop their own work through residency opportunities by sharing our studio and equipment, five local primary and secondary schools were engaged through workshop and creative open call writing, 437 participants were engaged through workshops both physical and online.

All this was only possible with this opportunity given by iCCi to be resident at Central Boiler House and we hope we can bring something truly unique to the local community!”

CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE

Through our innovative Re:Generation 2031 programme we developed and funded 30 new entry-level positions for ages 16-25 within a huge range of creative industries across the Thames Estuary region, as well as running an entrepreneurship programme and five pilot practical skills development opportunities – giving groups of young people live real-world projects underpinned by a modular training programme delivered by partner organisation. Alongside this, within our own teams we hosted 17 work experience placements for young people.

In 2022 we provided high quality creative experiences to 6,800 children and young people in Kent, through Re: Generation 2031 we developed and funded 30 new entry-level positions for ages 16-25, and we have stepped up our work in Medway though our position on the Medway Cultural Education Partnership.

Our ART31 programme for 13-25s has seen us continue to deliver free weekly theatre & performance groups based at Gulbenkian Arts Centre, led by our in-house Creative Engagement Practitioner. Our partners Square Pegs Arts also continue to host their drama and singing groups at Gulbenkian for young people with learning disabilities and autism. These groups see us working with 120 young people per week and have a huge impact on those young people in terms of building a sense of belonging, wellbeing and confidence.

Our free-to-access programme has also included TECH31 and SCREEN31 workshops throughout the year, where young people learn skills in technical theatre, live event production and filmmaking.

In spring our intergenerational company’s production of Superglue as part of NT Connections was performed at Gulbenkian, the Marlowe and Trinity Theatre to great acclaim from audiences, as well as both the National Theatre and the playwright Tim

GENFEST22 (@MisterEB)

Crouch. Following an audition process where we met 77 young people from across Kent, the 2023 Young Company of 20 actors have now been cast and are working alongside a young crew of 13 young people from TECH31 & SCREEN31 to produce (Circle Dreams Around) The Terrible, Terrible Past which will perform at Gulbenkian on 12 & 13 March 2023.

Our Youth Board ART31 Generate met regularly throughout the year and a core project was to plan, programme and produce GENFest – a youth arts festival for 13-25s across Kent. The group curated a programme showcasing young creatives’ work across theatre, comedy, visual art, music and film, as well as a series of artist-led workshops. Young people from across Kent took part in the festival and attendance was very diverse with 30% from Black or Asian heritage backgrounds and at least 17% reporting themselves as being in challenging circumstances. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive, so the group are now planning the next event for June 2023.

The community of young people involved in ART31 activities at Gulbenkian have been on several free theatre trips throughout 2022, seeing work by The PappyShow, Company Three, Icon Theatre and Pussy Riot.

Throughout 2022 we have been a core partner in FLUX, a Kentwide partnership project funded by Artswork and KCC Suicide Prevention which aimed to use the creative arts to support mental health and wellbeing in young people. The project supported our work with community partners KRAN & Spring Lane Neighborhood Centre, providing creative activity for their young people and testing cross-sector working to support health and wellbeing agendas.

Schools across Kent continue to engage with us through events at Gulbenkian Arts Centre as well as projects with our creative engagement team. In 2022 we delivered several schools outreach projects with visiting and associate artists including BAC Beatbox Academy, Half a String and Motionhouse – giving young people from local schools the chance to work with high quality artists and companies visiting and working in our region.

As our work develops in Medway, this year we have taken a lead role as part of the Medway Cultural Education Partnership (MCEP) which sees us working with partners to develop the cultural education strategy and offer for 0-25s in Medway. A key project for MCEP is the Medway Creative Schools Network, and in November we delivered a successful advocacy and networking event for headteachers and senior leaders in schools to engage with cultural providers.

Throughout 2022 we have continued to offer a year-round programme of film and live performance for families at Gulbenkian Arts Centre, and have developed Creative Club to run alongside this for 4-12 year olds to take part in artist-led workshops. Our annual family festival bOing! continues to be the University’s biggest community outreach event of the year. 2022 was our busiest bOing! weekend yet, with an estimated 12,000 people visiting the campus for an international programme featuring 30 different events and 172 artists.

Charlie Chopping

Charlie came to us first through our Youth Theatre, and then joined our NT Connections project, assisting with TECH31 on our Superglue production in 2022. He is now working professionally at the National Theatre.

“Gulbenkian has shaped my life and career. Initially a creative and social outlet, its Youth Theatre offered performance opportunity and lifelong friendships. Later, its National Theatre Connections programme introduced me to backstage theatre, with opportunities to run and design lights at the National Theatre at the age of 15 and to perform on stage with an incredible company.

Through consequent employment, including assisting TECH31 with the NT Connections 2022 production of Superglue, and these incredible experiences, the Gulbenkian has shaped my passion, technical skills and most importantly confidence to take into my professional career working in the film and television industry, overseas, and now, professionally, on tour with the National Theatre.”

RESEARCH DEVELOPMENT

We continue to champion impact-driven, challenge-led multidisciplinary research between colleagues across all divisions and our industry and community partners. Our current priorities are to facilitate research in the following themes: Creative and Cultural Education, Health and Wellbeing, Humanmachine Creativity, Diversity and Sustainability and Creative Heritage.

Health and wellbeing

We have completed a project recently with colleagues in Bioscience using generative AI, which is AI created to generate media art to generate realistic field images of parasites, to help develop tools to better diagnose tropical diseases. This is an exciting project in which AI technologies developed in the creative industries find an important application in fundamental bioscience research. We have also started a collaborative project with our Kent and Medway Medical school, exploring how 3D avatars can help support adherence to cognitive rehabilitation.

Human machine creativity

Another highlight this year is an innovative project, known as “Art Heart”, which combines wearable technology and AI to understand how humans interact with performance arts. This is done by monitoring audiences’ heart rate using a Fitbit-like wearable device while they are watching a live performance (see image right), creating a unique dataset which will be analysed by AI algorithms to understand human emotional reactions. We also aim to develop an AI to turn that audience data into a work of art. This fusion of artistic creativity and technologically advanced productivity provides creative power for the sustainable development of future art and human-computer interaction technology.

Creative heritage

The 'Shakespeare's Parlour' project set out to create a virtual, immersive experience of the kind of space within which Shakespeare might have written, in Unreal 5. We worked with creative writers, actors, digital artists and storytellers whose skill is to reproduce the past in creative ways. We’re currently working with a digital storyteller to explore how people will encounter and interact with the virtual space and its contents, thinking through questions of inclusion and exclusion now and then, and how our users can help us understand our historical evidence in new ways.

Future

In the coming year, we will set up a new cross-division research group in cultural and creative industries, bringing colleagues from across the university to address exciting research and practical questions.

We aim to set up a cross-division doctoral training centre in the area of human-AI partnership for creative industries, training PhD students in a multidisciplinary setting, involving experts in AI, creative arts, philosophy and sociology to address ethical issues around how AI could impact human creativity, how AI developers and artists can co-create responsible and trustworthy AI, and ultimately to answer the questions of how this human-AI partnership can reshape the definition of creativity itself.

Introducing our first iCCi Fellows

We have recruited five fellows who have been working on a broad range of topics, including i) the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in creative content generation, ii) investigation of sentiment analysis and text mining of local planning data to support placebased funding, iii) exploring models of professional practice for disabled-led arts, iv) translating brain scans to procedurally generate music using neuroscience approach, v) development of AI to help transfer a 2D concept art into a fully 3D environment into Unreal engine. One of the fellows, Mo Pietroni-Spenst, is organising a “slow conference” exploring the issues of disability and accessibility in arts. The slow conference is set to run between Monday 20 March and Thursday 6 April.

Will Dutta Artistic Director of Studio Wil Dutta

Jason Jones-Hall Director of Development, Five10Twelve

Mo Pietroni-Spenst Freelance performance maker, producer and researcher

Fernando Rosas Postdoctoral Researcher, Imperial College London

He Sun Visual Effects Supervisor and art director

At bOing! 22 volunteers had their heart rates monitored as they watched Alice by Jasmin Vardimon Company as part of the Art Heart project (Image: Tristram Kenton)

CREATIVE PRODUCTION AND PROFESSIONAL SERVICE

Our venues and professional services are an essential part of the campus offer, supporting the University’s commitment to creativity and the civic agenda. In 2022 we brought the Birth Rites and YouNome exhibitions to our campuses, and hosted events by community groups, schools and other University departments.

2022 was the first calendar year for the University wide project Creative Kent which celebrates creativity in all of its forms across campus. Over the course of the year the team supported over 63 external hirers, 40 schools and PSD’s including CEMS, MORA, School of Arts & Kent Law School and 14 student societies to deliver their events.

Particular highlights were; developing an evening events programme for the Lambeth conference; hosting the sold out In Conversation with Abdulrazak Gurnah as well as supporting the two week National Youth Orchestra residency over the Easter vacation.

Abdulrazak Gurnah in Conversdation (@misterEB)

Our work has also taken us off campus helping to deliver against the civic and community agenda by producing elements of the Medway Carnival and the Rapture Gaming Festival in Chatham as well as the Youth Summit in Canterbury. We have been working with partners such as Medway and Canterbury councils to understand and develop audiences within a regional context and to assess the impact of these on local areas. Through our family festival bOing! we created opportunities for academics from across the University to engage with our communities.

The team continue to develop new opportunities and are developing consultancy and evaluation services for regional and creative businesses alongside projects with divisional colleagues.

Creative Kent

Creative Kent is a University-wide project connecting creative practice across disciplines; forging links between research, teaching and off-campus cultural and creative industries.

In 2022 the University became host to Birth Rites Collection, a unique collection of artworks dedicated to the subject of childbirth. Artworks are installed across the Canterbury Campus, and in August we hosted a summer school of lectures and seminars for health professionals, academics, artists and policy advisors to share thought and knowledge on the subject.

On the Medway Campus, the YouNome exhibition, an exciting and thought-provoking art-science collaboration between artist Keith Robinson and Biosciences researchers Dr Gary Robinson and Professor Darren Griffin explored genomics in a novel way through a series of self-portraits, demonstrating the impact of individual chromosomes.

Growing from our pilot in 2021, Creative Kent has developed into a key communication theme, supporting recruitment and community engagement for the University. 2022 also saw the formation of the Creative Kent steering group, including representatives from across departments and divisions. This marks the start of the next phase in the project, which in future will reach beyond the campus, to celebrate and grow creative work across the county and to raise the profile of the exciting work already taking place.

I wanted to firstly say and absolutely enormous thank you for everything in the planning stages and the two weeks while we were with you. It was also really great to be able to engage with local people in the Kent/Canterbury community, including some local musicians and some local donors. The hall was brilliant for us, and we were able to fit in nicely, with enough space for a mammoth percussion set up and the first full NYO project since the winter of 2019/20. A special thanks to all of the technical team who were incredibly helpful with everything and nothing was too much trouble.

Alfie Whitbread Producer, National Youth Orchestra

A Conflict of Interest by Lauren McLaughlin: Birth Rites Collection.

iCCi plays a unique role in bridging the gap between creativity and technology, drawing on its research expertise to create informative and exciting opportunities for engagement.

Tony Witton Creative and Cultural Economy Manager

The Creative Industry sector has such significant economic and social potential for our area. Through iCCi, the University is mobilising its resources, expertise and networks to help build on previous successes and unlock fresh potential. They are a very welcome force in the development of the Creative Industries in Kent and the wider South East.

Sarah Dance Chair of the South East Local Enterprise Partnership

Keep up to date: kent.ac.uk/icci