Abstract

SeaScapes Co/Lab is a multi-year public engagement project curated by Suzy O'Hara for the SeaScapes marine heritage project. Funded by the National Heritage Lottery Fund, the project aims to critically explore the role that art and curatorial knowledge, processes and tools can play in brokering more sustainable modes of coexistence and co-creation between coastal communities (both human and non human) and their natural, cultural, and industrial maritime ecology and heritage.

The author has devised and tested experimental and cross-sector curatorial models of public engagement that bring together diverse coastal communities, multi-disciplinary artists and creatives, practice led researchers and marine and maritime sector specialists drawn from the SeaScapes consortia.

Practice led outputs are: Be the Sea, Blue Wave, Blast Beach: Digging Deeper, Whitburn Resonance, Sea Beats, Queer Shores and Seas, Coastal Cuisine, Sound Mirror, Renewable Blue, an exhibition entitled Blue Futures at The Word (South Shields), a series of podcasts, a website, a series of panel discussion and a catalogue.