Year: 2024

Exploring art and disability in rural spaces, Further Afield was curated by Bella Milroy and produced in collaboration with LEVEL Centre.

Further Afield is an ambitious, disabled-led project that explores the work of disabled artists who are rurally based or whose creative practices are rooted in rural settings. The programme seeks to celebrate the work of disabled artists and question what we expect to find in rural art, striving to broaden the current understanding of what the rural embodies, who experiences it, and what kinds of art is made there.

In 2022, Bella Milroy, in partnership with Level Centre, hosted a number of interviews with disabled artists based in rural locations across the country. These interviews were hosted as live events, and are still available on the Further Afield Archive page.

In the 2024 iteration of the project, Bella Milroy has collaborated again with Level Centre to curate a series of recorded interviews, written work and research into the experiences of disabled artists in rural settings.

In a series of six interviews available in audio and video format, Bella Milroy speaks with disabled artists from across the UK, exploring what living and making art in rural spaces means to them. The conversations explore topics such as barriers to access, isolation, rural infrastructure, creative community, imagination, and the desire for diverse, inclusive and accessible opportunities.

For each interview there is an accompanying text created by one of six different disabled writers. They were commissioned in response to the recordings as a way of furthering the conversation about art and disability in rural settings.

This programme features some of the most exciting artists and writers around today, offering insight into how disabled artists make work and the places in which that work emerges.

Click here for the project homepage

Further Afield was supported by Arts Council England, LEVEL Centre, Shape Arts, Derbyshire Libraries, Haarlem Artspace, Arts Derbyshire and Wysing Arts Center.

Artist interviews and writing