Colouredge -10th Anniversary Commission.
Littleborough Arts Festival 10TH ANNIVERSARY COMMISSION
In 2011, Littleborough Arts Festival celebrated its tenth anniversary. To commemorate the event, the Festival Committee commissioned a major new artwork: ‘COLOUREDGE’, by Maxine Kennedy and Paul Haywood.
Maxine and Paul are researching the local landscape and designing a bespoke selection of colours and hues especially for Littleborough. This exploration will capture the daily diversity of the colour landscape and harness the rich natural and social heritage of the town. They are in the process of producing a colour palette and swatch that will reflect on the identity of Littleborough on the Pennine Edge.
The commission was advertised nationally and selected by competition via a panel comprising; members of the committee, representatives of local interest groups (including Wardle High School), the Council, and from Touchstones in Rochdale.
The winning work was selected from a wide and diverse range of high quality submissions received from artists with strong, international reputations for public artwork. The panel were keen to appoint an artwork that responded to our unique environment on the Pennine edge with artists that would actively engage with the community in Littleborough as part of the project’s development. The panel selected the winning project on the strong and creative way in which it reflects, imaginatively, the visual impact of our local environmental and cultural heritage.
The winning artists, Maxine Kennedy and Paul Haywood have an established creative partnership who, in recent years, have worked on environmental colour projects in a number of other cities nationally and internationally such as the ‘Aberdeen Greys’ and ‘Clermont Noir’ projects. Paul brings a particular knowledge and insight to the project having been brought up in Littleborough.
A key aspect of the commission and the legacy for the project will be the active involvement of the community. Progress of their work to date can be found on the commission website: www.colouredge.org.