“We dream a lot of the future, sometimes we can feel it coming.” Sahjan Kooner (The Villagers), 2023

“Welcome to the terrain vague.” melissandre varin, 2024

Artists are catalysts. We are the dreamers and doers, collaborators and supporters, guests and hosts who work alongside communities to imagine and co-evolve our civic infrastructure.

In the mid 1960s the Artist Placement Group (APG) made strenuous efforts to radically transform artists’ relation to society. Describing themselves as ‘incidental persons’, the group proposed getting involved in the processes of other organisations, from steel factories to government offices. APG considered artists a hugely underused human resource that offered a potential benefit of tangential thinking and making. Eastside Projects is interested in both the function of artists ‘to watch the doings and listen to the noises’ and APG’s concept of the open brief.

Incidental Artists is a series of significant commissions recruited through a combination of invitation and open call, they are structured in two stages.

Stage 1: Feasibility study Artists commissioned with an Open Brief to conduct a context-based ‘feasibility study’ – practice-led, public research leading to prototypes, propositions, relationships, proposals for future projects, artworks & collaborations.

Stage 2: Public Project Outcome defined during feasibility process – exhibition, community project, public artwork, event programme, performance, online etc.

Since 2022 Eastside Projects has been working with Abbas Zahedi, Alice Theobald, Sahjan Kooner, melissandre varin and Verity-Jane Keefe who have responded to the invitation to be an Incidental Artist in five different ways. In Autumn 2024 we began the process with Marley Starskey Butler and Seema Mattu. Doings is a first public moment to reflect on the contexts, beginnings, outputs, collaborators, supporters, budgets and next steps in the journeys of each project individually, and collectively.