Question Your Teaspoons (QyT) is a multi-disciplinary arts company based in London and Yorkshire. The company’s founders and directors, Sheena Holliday (Crestfallen Productions) and Chris Williams (Drunken Chorus), share a special interest in site-specific events that address notions of community, our sense of belonging, and our attitudes and relationships to public spaces.
QyT are now creating their first piece of work - an installation for Up the Wall in Chester. Up the Wall is a site-specific festival, taking place in and around Chester’s historic locations. Curated by hÅb for Chester Performs, Up the Wall features truly unique, site-responsive performance, projection and installation. For full programme details upthewall.posterous.com
We’ll be creating a site-based installation, which we’re calling The Space Betweens Us.
As festival artists we've been given a small budget for to make the work happen. However, this has to include materials, travel and accommodation, and we’ve been particularly ambitious with our plans for the project, so we’re now looking for an extra £150 so that we can realise the full potential of ideas.
For Up the Wall festival, we’re creating a multi-media installation, which will document our journey along the border between Wales and England, and a series of encounters with local people who live on or close to the border.
We’ll be visiting a number of towns and villages with interesting stories and relationships to the border. For example, we’ll be travelling to Llanymynech, where there’s a pub and a golf course, both of which are divided by the border; as well as Knighton, where the train station is in a different country to the rest of the town.
We’ll be chatting to people about life on the border and asking them to share their stories and memories. We’ll document our journey on film, as well as recording the stories of the people we meet. All of this will then be turned into an installation along a section of wall around Chester Castle, where we will map out the border, marking upon it the places we visited and the people we met.
There’ll also be audio recordings of stories and memories, to listen to as you look out across the city towards the border. And a projection of the edited film of our journey.
Up the Wall takes place at night, so part of the appeal of the installation will be that it will be beautifully lit with LEDs and Electroluminescent wire. The border will be marked out on the wall and visitors will be able to step inside the 'virtual map'. Headphones will be provided to listen to audio recordings from the sites, whilst looking out into the night in the direction of the border and imagining the places you’re hearing being described.
We’re looking for £150 to help us to complete these project. Without that small amount of extra money we would need to scale back the project quite a bit, visiting less places and talking to less people.
As a new company, this is our very first piece of work, so we’re keen to make it work really well. We don’t want to have to cut corners or make compromises. As experienced artists we have the skills and ability to make this a great project, but as a new collaboration we have to work hard to get things off the ground - which takes lots of effort and (crucially) an injection of cash!!
So, we’re grateful for any donations towards this project.
Donate anything over £1 and, as a thank you, we'll feature your name on our website, online social networks and any other promotional materials and/or print for the project.
Pledges of £5 and over will be rewarded with a special invite to the festival so that you can have a chat with us and ask any questions.
And for anything over £10 we’ll send you a VIP invite to our site-based festival in Yorkshire, with priority access to events and you’ll get to meet all of the artists involved.
