STTA: Space Time Tools Advice
IOU Creation Centre welcomes applications from any artists, organisations or students who would like support in getting a project off the ground.
STTA: Space Time Tools Advice
STTA is IOU’s artistic development programme for individuals or groups practising any discipline who are interested in IOU’s approach to making. It is designed to help realise projects that are in development by providing support in the form of studio space, IOU staff time, workshop tools and advice from IOU arts professionals or a combination of all four.
For 50 years, IOU has developed a distinctive specialism in translating ideas into tangible, often large-scale interdisciplinary works. This has required a deep understanding of both artistic intention and material process, how a conceptual spark becomes an engineered structure or a technological experience. We have often translated one discipline into another, sound into sculpture, biography into wood carving, history into geography. By opening our workshops, equipment, and expert network to resident artists we want to share this approach to practice.
IOU’s approach is inventive, imaginative and distinctive.
Guidelines for applicants for IOU’s Space Time Tools Advice mentoring programme
What is IOU?
- IOU’s core purpose is to make new, surprising, original productions exploring the intersection between art, engineering, performance and technology.
- IOU’s work is experimental in concept and content and often presented in new and unusual ways for audiences to experience.
- We aim to reach underserved audiences in the local area and nationally.
- We are keen to support and encourage young and mid-career artists and welcome new and underrepresented artists through our work.
- Through Space Time Tools Advice and IOU’s other support activities, we aim to develop artistic talent in the arts sector helping individual artists, groups of collaborators and arts companies to produce the best work they can.
If your work is in-tune with this approach, IOU’s STTA may be able to help you to:
- Develop your ideas
- Develop and produce your new piece of work
- Develop your own art practice
- Something completely new we haven’t thought of
- Co-produce and present your work
The type and style of work we can help with is very broad:
Installations, painting, sculpture, film, photography, animation, dance, digital art, virtual worlds, music/sound, location/site specific art, landscape art, performance poetry, performance art, street art and performance art, architecture and art forms we’ve missed from this list or haven’t thought of yet.
In all these art forms we are looking for something new and special in your ideas and for artists with talent and potential.
Please note: There are some types of work that we have great respect for, but are unlikely to be accepted for the STTA programme. This is because they don’t feature in IOU’s work or we don’t have the facilities to support them, or they are better supported by other institutions and organisations:
- Plays for regular theatre venues
- Scripts or art forms that rely heavily on dialogue
- Circus skills
- Work intended for commercial or popular culture
The STTA programme is fluid and can be adapted to your project and the funding you seek.
When can you apply?
IOU is open all year around to any artist or organisation who requires project support. Your idea can be at an early stage when we may be able to advise you on next steps or more developed, perhaps having some development funding attached to your project that is for working with IOU on the STTA programme.
If accepted:
IOU will help build an IOU support team with you that most suits what you are trying to achieve. This may be just someone to feed back at important moments in the works development or provide key members of your creation team, eg. director, technician, producer, maker etc.
IOU also scouts for projects that the company may wish to help produce and tour in a more involved collaboration. Please let us know if you would like IOU to be involved with your project as a co-production.
If you have a project or idea and are interested in this opportunity to develop it, use the form below to get in touch.
Space is the first and most tangible form of support an artist requires. It is the platform on which ideas are tested, failures are explored, and discoveries are made. We understand that space is not merely physical, it is conceptual and psychological too.
At the IOU Creation Centre and IOU Hostel in Hebden Bridge, artists are offered both dedicated studios and a live-work environment designed to nurture experimentation. This is a space deliberately built for openness: a meeting point between disciplines, generations, and materials. By creating a site where sculptors can meet performers and visual artists can engage with digital technologists, we provide an ecosystem where collaboration flourishes organically.
In an age where affordable studios are vanishing and short-term project spaces dominate, our commitment to long-term creative infrastructure is, we believe, increasingly invaluable. The development of the IOU Archive, a living record of fifty years of pioneering, site-specific performance, stands as proof of how sustained access to creative space produces originality and resilience. For artists entering this environment, space becomes more than a location; it becomes a catalyst for a myriad of creative outputs.
Time: If space provides the body of artistic practice, time offers literal breathing room. The ability to pause, to think, to iterate, to make without the pressure of immediate delivery, is increasingly rare, but time and time again I have seen the value in protecting this time. When I first began offering artist support in a different post the general model would be a 2 week residency, in week one you would encounter experimentation, testing, a willingness to burn through ideas, to propose and tinker, early in the second week all this fruitful labour was extinguished, replaced with a fervent push to show, to present, to worry about what an audience might see on Friday as opposed to the continued evolution of week one ideas.
Tools: Innovation depends not only on ideas but on access to the tools that make those ideas real. Through the Creation Centre we offer artists these resources (not least of which the large studio space and workshop), including production support and technical expertise. These tools extend beyond the mechanical; they include the knowledge and collaborative networks that sustain creative production. We might often not know the answer to a particular query but more often than not we know someone who will, someone who also understands the value and responsibility to be open with sharing their knowledge and expertise, a network of open sourced expertise or insight in the form of other makers and creators.
Advice: The final pillar of IOU’s approach is perhaps the most personal: advice. The creative course of an artist is rarely linear, and mentorship can help mitigate those periods of isolation and hopefully spark evolution. IOU’s artistic team offers hands-on guidance from inception through to production, drawing on a broad range of accumulated expertise in creative practice, fabrication techniques, fundraising, marketing, and creative partnerships.
This mentorship is not prescriptive but conversational. Artists are treated as collaborators in a shared process of discovery. Workshops, tutorials, and feedback sessions form part of an ongoing dialogue that supports both practical skill and conceptual thinking.
