Collaboration in the Arts
31st March 2025
Collaboration in the Arts
The MA in Creative and Critical Writing includes a very practical module called Creative Industries during which students prepare themselves for the world of working in the arts, as well as running a major project – producing the university’s creative writing anthology, which includes text and graphic work from across the school and the community.
We get industry guests to speak to the students in this module and in March we had a visit from the Stroud collaborative known as (both laughing). You can see their website here https://www.bothlaughingcollaborative.com/. (Both laughing) comprises two feminist artists, Emily Lucas and Nic Grellier, who specialise in drawing but together get involved in other art projects.
Emily has recently completed a PhD in Bristol and met Nic when interviewing other artists for her research. The transcripts of the interviews were frequently interrupted by the description (both laughing) and the name stuck!
Nic and Emily talked about how they started working together, about what it means to work truly collaboratively – with no leader, no objectives, just paying attention to each other and reacting to each other’s input in creative ways, and about their feminist drawing manifesto.
To their surprise they found that the work they did together was often ‘text drawing’, producing posters, badges, and playing with words. Their game ‘enjambment’ which the MA students played with, involves making new words by sticking together three words from a huge list of cards that the two have produced. These words both inspire more creative outputs and also give fascinating titles and insights into their work.
