Culture Syndicates CIC

  ‘We are thankful to the Culture Recovery Fund for supporting us by committing funding to our work. As a social enterprise we strive to add value to the sector; our plans for the Culture Recovery Fund aim to do just that. This funding will enable us to develop our Workforce Futures stream of work, a development project that we began prior to COVID-19. We have modelled a new approach to workforce development that would offer more value to the sector.’ We wrote these words at the end of 2020 and as the year ends, we have managed to achieve all the targets that we set out for ourselves using the Culture Recovery Fund (CRF) so gratefully received from the National Lottery Heritage Fund (NLHF). We have used the funding to employ an admin to help the Head of Projects to deliver on training our heritage assistants and ensure that we are digitally ready for the next year ahead. It has been a challenging year, but our team has been able to support each other and create a future for Cul...

I am writing this on day 18 of my new job as Head of Workforce Inclusion for Culture Syndicates CIC. I knew about Culture Syndicates from the time I moved to Nottingham in May 2018 when I became a Relationship Manager for Museums for Arts Council England.  I engaged with the team and found out about projects, past and present as well as ideas for the future.  Then three years and four months later I was the successful candidate for the new job as Head of Workforce Inclusion.  I started on 13 September where I met Ruth Gray and Neville Stankley in person and Feixue online for my first team meeting.  Over the course of the first week, I read the business plan and started conversations with our Heritage Assistants.  I started to reach out to cultural organisations and universities to introduce myself and Culture Syndicates.  More to follow!   During my second week Neville and I had the opportunity to put our heads together and we started to scope an o...

  Light is something we are all searching for in these turbulent times and the use of light through the centuries to reflect our heritage goes back longer than we can imagine. Since the use of the flame and shadows in caves telling the tales of hunting and heroic events light projection has been a way of bringing people together in a sense of wonder on dark nights. Chinese Magic mirrors originating in China and Japan, when held up to the sunlight reflected their carved backs onto a dark wall since the 2 nd C- BC Han Dynasty, so called magic because the 19 th C travellers who brought them back couldn’t find out how they managed to project through carved metal. The mirrors carvings were of the trees and surrounds of the local areas and watching them reflected was a mysterious event. Shadow play through backlit cloth with the use of leather carved flat puppets in Java taught moral stories as well used as a pure artform. This form of puppetry has been widely seen throughout the w...