Telling the Story of Cardiff and the region's creative activity
In the first half of the year, we brought together 12 creatives online from across the Cardiff Capital Region to create work for a unique story map.
The Our Creative Place project, a partnership with Arts Council of Wales, encouraged connections and networking across creative sectors. It centred creative access at its core with the experience, support and guidance of access coordinator Becky Davies.
Unfold the Our Creative Place storymap to enjoy the 12 new pieces of work 🗺
Recording and releasing series three of our podcasts, Get A ‘Proper’ Job and Rhwybeth Creadigol? was a real highlight for me. It was an opportunity to feature a diverse group of contributors and shine a spotlight on a range of topics such as cultivating leadership, careers making social impact and mental health in the creative sector.
We welcomed 14 guests across seven episodes and added transcripts to all series three episodes so more people can enjoy the conversations.
You can catch up with all episodes here 🎧
Our partnership with CAER Heritage kicked off in earnest at an art masterclass with the communities of Caerau and Ely and then the creation of a project story flipbook created by our placement student Emily Megson.
In November, we met with 30 local volunteers, team members and creatives to officially unveil our co-produced timeline installation that marks the project’s story and creativity to date and is a central feature at the new CAER community heritage centre.
Fostering Connections and Collaborations
Across the year, 200+ creatives came together online for our new monthly meet-up Need! Have! Collaborate! The events are designed to share and showcase new funds, grants and opportunities and spark collaboration across the creative sectors. Here is what you thought:
In 2021, we’ve been Joining the Dots and found that Creative Cardiff is not alone.
There are city and town networks like us all over the UK and during the past year we’ve been getting to know them all more. It has been really inspiring. As well as organising opportunities for these vital creative networks to gather, we also researched their impact and value.
You can read our full ‘Joining the Dots’ report here.
As in-person connections are still limited due to COVID-19 restrictions, we knew that being counted, showcasing your creative work and having online ways to search for others to collaborate with was more important than ever.
With our web developers Hoffi, we made some big updates to our network directory to make it even more useful. We’d encourage you to log-in and update your profile with your portfolio, videos and testimonials.
Encouraging STEAM (science, tech, engineering, arts and maths) collaborations is something we're passionate about at Creative Cardiff.
In November, we joined forces with the Biosciences department at Cardiff University to launch the ART LAB commission.
The new pieces of work, focused on antimicrobial resistance, will be exhibited as part of Cardiff Science Festival at Chapter in February 2022.
Encouraging enterprise and entrepreneurship
This year alone, we’ve hosted a whopping 500+ jobs on our Opportunities page, showcasing the breath of creative economy activity in the city and region.
We’d love to know if you found your job or recruited someone new through the Creative Cardiff website this year – email us your story.
We have always advocated that spaces to think, do, meet and make are important for creatives. Earlier this year, we launched our new resource which lists spaces for hire in one handy place.
Check them out here.
🎉 Creative Cardiff celebrated its fifth birthday in October 2020 and to mark this, we brought together thoughts on our work from some of those who have been present throughout this journey and who offered their insights for the future.
Read our Five Years On publication.
Thank you for the support and guidance of our Advisory Group, student producers, website and design agency Hoffi and our colleagues within the University.
Your thoughts, comments and ideas about the network are really important to us as without you, the creative community, there would be no Creative Cardiff.
I love a chat so please do email me at suttonv@cardiff.ac.uk if you’d like to catch up. We'll be in touch in January with our plans for 2022.
Until then, wishing you all a creative end to the year.
