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.

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