IMAGINE Midsomer Norton
Shape Your High Street - Art commission
Free Workshops: April - May 2025 see below for schedule and artists info
Launch Event Weekend: 25th - 27th July 2025
As part of the IMAGINE Midsomer Norton programme, four community artists will be using their creative practice to work with local people, co-creating a renewed vision for the town’s regeneration.
Each commissioned artist will work with community groups to develop an artwork which captures the essence of Midsomer Norton and its people, as well as expressing people’s hopes for the future of the town centre. The resulting artworks will be used to inform the Town Centre Plan currently being developed, and will be installed in prominent locations along Midsomer Norton High Street to coincide with the launch of the local consultation.
The work is funded by the West of England Mayoral Combined Authority’s Housing and Regeneration Enabling Fund. It is being created in a partnership between Bath & North East Somerset Council, Midsomer Norton Town Council, Midsomer Norton Community Trust and Midsomer Norton Arts & Music Festival. The producer is Katie O’Brien, project director of 44AD artspace.
IMAGINE Project Workshops
A Song For Midsomer Norton
Music by
China Blue Fish and Trevphonic
China Blue Fish is working with the community and producer Trevphonic to capture stories of people’s connection to Midsomer Norton, their lineages, experiences, histories and hopes and dreams for the future. The project involves archival research and conversations with local groups. The song will be comprised of field recordings from the geophony of the local area and landscapes (trees, rivers, woodlands), biophony (birdsong, animals) and anthrophony (human voices). It will fuse local folk traditions, historical mining songs from the area, vox pops, ambient sounds, and recordings with local choirs and singers. A live performance of the work in the Town Park will be complemented by a visual artwork displayed on the high street, allowing visitors to listen to the song in the place that inspired it.
China Blue Fish is a multidisciplinary arts practitioner working across music, theatre, poetry and facilitation. She devise and tours theatre shows, performs in bands, and works as a composer and musical director for theatre. Her interests as an artist lie in the unheard voice, in collective wellbeing and sustainability and creating beauty and joy.
Trevphonic is an electronic music producer based in Bristol. His music spans chill-hop to triphop, deep house to ambient. He is a drummer and accordian player, and has been playing in bands since the age of 15. He is a long-term collaborator with China Blue Fish.
Landmarks
Painting by
Jo Slade
Jo is creating a series of paintings of landmarks that are important to local people in Midsomer Norton. The artworks focus on memory, history, the present town and the future hopes for the high street. Painted in acrylic on wood panels, they tell a visual story of the town centre that is both hopeful and reflective. The artworks will be informed by a series of intergenerational community workshops in which participants can learn simple drawing and painting techniques while sharing their stories and memories, as well as their aspirations for Midsomer Norton’s future.
Jo Slade is a fine artist. Graduating with a Fine Art degree from Brighton University in 2007, she worked as a nurse before returning to painting in 2023. She is primarily a landscape painter, taking inspiration from the natural world including the fields behind her home in the rural outskirts of south Bath. She has exhibited at Burdalls Yard, Royal United Hospital, Pound Arts Centre Corsham, Studio 22, The Little Theatre and 44AD. She has been in residency with Remerge and Little Lost Robot at Old Printwork Arts, Radstock.
We Are Midsomer Norton!
Portraits by
Steve Griffiths
We Are Midsomer Norton! is a pop-up portrait gallery, comprising a collection of paintings by the artist, displayed alongside portraits created by local people of themselves or their loved ones. Alternatively, residents can participate by contributing a photograph or print to be displayed alongside the paintings, creating a vibrant wall that celebrates the community. The images celebrate the everyday people who make the high street what it is today - from business owners to maintenance workers and volunteers. Sustainability plays a key roll in all he does, always looking to reuse, reclaim, and celebrate, people, places and things.
Steve ‘Griff’ Griffiths is an artist and maker who lives in the Radstock area and is a resident artist at Old Printworks Arts. A primary school teacher by trade, he has been making art and facilitating others for over 30 years. His artistic work centres around using reclaimed materials as a canvas, and he creates large pop art inspired portraits and landscapes on wood and cardboard. He also upcycles furniture and has been building a new business, ACHUB, which focuses on all areas of his practice.
Breathless
Poetry by
P Burton-Morgan
Breathless is a poetry collection mapping the highs and lows, joys and sorrows of the leisure pursuits and hobbies of west country youth both now and in the past. P’s own writing will be complemented by poems written by local young people and elders in a series of creative workshops taking place over the spring months. The workshops will enrich and expand participants’ creative lives, and encourage them to share their own responses to the place and their memories of leisure activities. A selection of poems will be displayed in shop windows, and there will also be an open mic event for community poets from all generations to share their work with one another.
P Burton-Morgan is an award-winning local poet and theatre maker. They founded touring theatre company Metta Theatre in 2005, writing and directing over 30 productions including Sherlock Holmes & The PoisonWood (Watermill Theatre), Little Prince (Taunton Brewhouse) and In The Willows (Exeter Northcott). In 2018 they were opera artistin-residence at the V&A. Their debut novel O is currently out on submission with United Agents and their poetry has been published in Propel Magazine and anthologized by Arachne Press.