Magnetic North Blog

This week we're running our paid online residency for experienced artists. Space/Time is a creative retreat for artists from any art form that asks the question “How can you continue to thrive as an artist?”. Normally participants travel together to a location in Scotland. However, due to the pandemic, we have rethought Space/Time as an online residency. The residency aims to refresh participants through a stimulating examination of creativity in this new way of working and living. The residency artists are:

Since making our debut with Tom McGrath’s The Dream Train in November 1999, we’ve produced plays, music-theatre, installations and films and have run a unique and comprehensive multi-artform artist development programme. We have supported more than 250 artists from theatre, dance, film, visual arts, music and literature to create new work and develop their practice in new ways. Restless Exploration: 21 Years of Magnetic North contains details of all our work between 1999 and 2020, including images from productions and notes by Artistic Director Nicholas Bone. It also features work specially commissioned from some of the artists we have worked with over the last twenty-one years.

Even in 2020, the strangest year in our history, we managed to stay productive: supporting artists and making work through twelve micro-commissions, four development projects, three online productions and three artists’ residencies. 

The book was designed by Fogbank Projects and is available in a limited edition of 200. Copies are available online for £10 (plus p&p) and all proceeds will go directly to supporting individual artists. The first 50 orders from our website will also receive two David Shrigley Pass the Spoon postcards:
https://www.magneticnorth.org.uk/about-us/restless-exploration-book

The Dream Train (1999) by Tom McGrath. David Gallacher as The Baron (1999).

We've commissioned some of the artists we have worked with over the years to contribute something to mark our 21st anniversary. Each has contributed something connected to their work with us and received a small fee. Every week we'll add a new commission to this blog post.

Photo by Nicholas Bone

As reported in my previous post, we began our first development week on Sara Maitland's book Gossip from the Forest in the week the lockdown began. We had already planned to work slightly differently because of the travel restrictions that had been introduced the week before, but Boris Johnson's announcement came immediately after we had finished our first day so more adaptations were needed.

We hope that you are all keeping well and looking forward to better times in 2021.

Magnetic North has just published a summary annual report for the year ended 31 March 2020. You can read it here.

An annual report is always and inevitably out of date, but 2019-2020 now feels like a different world, never mind a different year. So we also wanted to share a brief account of what we’ve been doing since March 2020 when the world changed. Magnetic North is in the fortunate position of being regularly funded by Creative Scotland, and our aim has been to use that position of privilege to keep working to support artists.

 During the Covid-19 crisis we have: