Pier Projects Art Agency, 2016-2025
This website archives our programmes inspired by and in collaboration with the coastal town of Felixstowe, Suffolk.
How We Worked
Our primary motivation was to test new ways of bringing artists and communities together to explore connections between arts and health within the specific context of the coast. We sought to challenge hierarchies betweens artists-audiences-commissioner-place. Much of our work was process-led and experimental. This approach allowed us to keep asking important questions: Who is this project for? Who can be involved and benefit? Who will care?
We committed to developing and deliveirng a programme that complemented rather than competed with other arts activity in the East. Our work focused on three main strands
Commissioning Socially-Engaged Artists
Artist Support and Development
Creative, Community Engagement
Collaboration was the very core of our approach. By working through ‘borrowed infrastructure’ - without a fixed project space and often in the public realm - we prioritised community participation and partnership working. This allowed us to explore different ways of engaging audiences, helped us to limit our carbon footprint ,and stay nimble and responsive in rapidly changing times.
Pier Projects became a registered CIC in 2017, operating as a not-for-profit. after a period of action research. We raised money to support the artists and communities we worked alongside through grants.
Why We Did This
Founded in 2017 by curator Natalie Pace and arts educator Louise Stratford, `our work emerged out of the experience of training together for a marathon, running along Felixstowe’s seafront. These interests highlighted our siloed thinking of art and health and dualisms of mind and body - and raised questions about the potential of art to interrogate these themes.
These thematics are rooted in aspects of Felixstowe’s heritage. During the 1850’s the Suffolk town was a renowned Victorian spa resort, frequented for the health benefits of being by sea. This history as a spa town and the physiological benefits of its coastal location included several convalescent homes across the twentieth century, where people went to rest and recover from illness
Our Programme
Artist Commissions
We commissioned artists to develop projects beyond the gallery, where we believe the impact of art to be most potent. From 2019 onwards, we worked more extensively with artists who have a social practice and collaborative methodology.
Artist commissions emerged through open calls as well as through working in partnership with a community-led arts panel to select artists.
Community Collaboration
From 2017-21, we worked in partnership with Level Two Youth Project to develop co-creative skills, education and confidence with children and young adults.
This included commissioning artists to deliver workshops and offering a blend of arts, health and wellbeing activity. Over time, the focus shifted to work in slower, more longitudinal ways that offered young people ways to direct sessions and projects.
We also collaborated widely with other arts, heritage and cultural organisations in Felixstowe and beyond including Hamilton MAS, Landguard Fort and Felixstowe Museum.
Artist Support
We supported artists through 1-1 mentoring which was first instigated during the pandemic.
We ran a programme of artist-led talks (Studio Socials) and events (Slow Socials) to aid knowledge-sharing and networking, specifically amplifying socially engaged practice.
In 2024-2025, we ran. a pilot artist development programme, ‘Pier Peers’, led by writer and coach Ellen Mara De Wachter.
Upon Every Wave, 2018, Adam Bridgland
From the series, The Distance Between, (2022) Yva Jung