Featured Marketplace Researcher: Dr. Sarah Lowndes

Photograph taken by Alison Toon at Esplanade: A Procession for Women, curated by Sarah Lowndes for Kunsthalle Cromer (2018).

NUA University Research Fellow Dr. Sarah Lowndes set up arts organisation Kunsthalle Cromer in 2017 to enhance the cultural provision available within the town of Cromer and the wider area of Norfolk through the promotion of visual art, music, literature, cinema, performance and interdisciplinary art forms. To date, she has carried out two accessible, free and exciting public art projects: Panoramic Sea Happening (2017) a re-enactment of Tadeusz Kantor’s 1967 happening, at East Beach, Cromer and Esplanade: A Procession for Women (2018), in which 100 local girls and women carried red parasols along West Promenade, Cromer, on International Women’s Day.

Photograph taken by Violet Wright at Panoramic Sea Happening curated by Sarah Lowndes for Kunsthalle Cromer (2017).

For the Research Marketplace Dr. Lowndes will showcase the forthcoming Kunsthalle Cromer project, Like the Sea I Think, which is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. For this project, Dr. Lowndes will run two concurrent, 8-week courses of shared reading and creative writing workshops, at Cromer Library and Millennium Library, Norwich. The Like the Sea I Think workshops will be delivered in partnership with community librarians Maria Pavledis and Rachel Willis and will be offered free to all people aged 16 or over resident in the Norfolk area. The workshops will offer the opportunity to read and discuss exciting literature about the sea by authors including naturalist Rachel Carson, novelist Ernest Hemingway and poet Helen Dunmore, then carry out creative writing exercises. The workshops will also be offered at Norwich University of the Arts (NUA) Library to NUA and UEA staff and students. The project will conclude with a publication of an open-submission anthology of new marine-themed writing from Norfolk, Like the Sea I Think, edited by Sarah Lowndes and designed by Emily Benton and distributed through UEA Publishing Project.