Art and the Public Realm Bristol

Open Fold is an area wide public art programme curated and developed by Paul O’Neill. This 1 year programme is being develop in close dialogue with Bristol City Council’s Place Shaping Team. The aim of the project is to deliver an attractive area improvement plant focused around Gainsborough Square and its surrounding streets, which will increase employment opportunities and housing numbers and provide better links within the estate and to the city.

As part of the project Bristol City Council has commissioned a public art programme to develop in tandem with the larger regeneration project which will be developed by Bristol based curator and commissioner Paul O’Neill. The programme will commence in August 2012.

Lockleaze is a post-war housing estate that was one of several built in Bristol during the late 1940s and early 1950s in response to the shortage of housing across the city. The area is currently going through a neighbourhood planning process and is one of the government's 'Frontrunner' pilot schemes that help local groups identify how their local area should change in the future.

Lockleazes’s housing stock is largely 1930’s and 1950’s council homes which were previously owned by Bristol Corporation, and a large percentage of these are pre-cast concrete structures. The area benefits from its proximity to large green and open spaces which flank the estate. The area has other important historical features such as the Second World War anti-aircraft battery on Purdown (locally known as Purdown Percy), the ruins of which remain today, and Purdown Farm (that was demolished as the estate was built), Purdown BT Tower, and the nearby historic landscape of Stoke Park.

The programme is being funded by section 106 funds from the sale of Hewlett Packard’s factory site in the area and has a special focus on the development of work with young people and associated training initiatives.

Paul O'Neill

Paul O'Neill is an independent curator, artist and writer based in Bristol.  He has co-curated more than fifty curatorial projects across the world. His writing has been published in many books, catalogues, journals and magazines and he is a regular contributor to Art Monthly. He is reviews editor for Art and the Public Sphere Journal and on the editorial board of The Exhibitionist Journal and The Journal of Curatorial Studies. He is editor of the curatorial anthology, Curating Subjects (2007), and co-editor of Curating and the Educational Turn with Mick Wilson (2010), both published by de Appel and Open Editions (Amsterdam and London), and author of Locating the Producers: Durational Approaches to Public Art (Amsterdam, Valiz, 2011) edited with Claire Doherty. He recently completed the authored book with The Culture of Curating, and the Curating of Culture(s), (MIT Press, 2012).

For further info see: www.pauloneill.org.uk