God’s Eye View: Curating the intersections between artist, audience and place (2023)

'God’s Eye View: Curating the intersections between artist, audience and place' explores a pilot collaboration between Sheffield Hallam University and the No Bounds festival. Through site-specific installations, they investigated how artistic practice, audience engagement, and place intersect. The iterative dialogue between academic researchers, festival organisers, community partners, and artists resulted in immersive works in previously under-utilised urban settings. These works foregrounded notions of identity, civic context, and public engagement. Curatorial experimentation within unconventional environments enabled diverse publics, including residents, students, cultural participants, and festival audiences, to encounter and interact with creative practice in ways that transcended conventional institutional frameworks. This initiative exemplifies creative knowledge exchange that disrupts traditional transactional models by fostering bilateral learning, strengthening institutional-community relationships, and contributing to broader reflections on the role of universities within their cultural ecosystems.