21/12/2025
“PLUS ONE” with Bloc Projects is an inter-city “open studio” and six week residency that we launched in July 2025, inviting three practitioners based in the three cities of Northern England – Sheffield, Leeds, and Manchester – to use the gallery as a space for lab-style workshop testing, trans-local knowledge exchange, and creative expression that necessitated communal invitation or what we describe as “bringing your people with you”.
We wanted to test what the “Nurturing Ecologies” framework looked like as a space in Sheffield; to ask, what might the spatial infrastructure to resource community-focused creative practice look and feel like?
Guided by this question, we built an “open studio” in the gallery space of Bloc Projects, once again using materials we had foraged and salvaged from cultural spaces and organisations across Sheffield. It became a space for assembly but also one to foster connection and facilitate deep collaboration, containing utilities to support various practices (such as a scanner, paints, desks and office chairs) as well as tools for exhibition and performance.
The project builds interregional connections by facilitating and resourcing not only the work of the “PLUS ONE” residents, photographer, Ai Narapol (), musician and sound artist, Petrelli Purple (), and visual artist, Ella Mayamothi (), but by using their burgeoning practices to further nurture the creative ecologies of Sheffield and their respective cities.
The project had a number of public-facing aspects in addition to the residencies, such as workshops, showcases, and artist presentations. But the paragon of this was the open programming for community organisations across the city, such as and the Sheffield Universities Palestine Student Encampments, where they were invited to use the space throughout. Here, we sought to unravel the idea of the residency as an exclusionary mechanism for individual artistic development and instead play with its porous, communal potential.
