Cobalt Studios

General information

What is Cobalt?

Arts and live music venue, creative events, artists studios and more in development.

What do we actually do?
• We provide high quality artists spaces for 16 for artists who cannot afford to pay commercial rents and whose practices benefit the cultural community as well as the wider community.

• We are developing a ground floor multi functional art project space for performance, exhibition, music, food and drink. This space will be public facing.

• Additionally, on the top floor, we will develop a cultural work space that offers seminar opportunities, networking, meeting space, hot desking, educational space and knowledge sharing.

• Finally, we would like to develop a resource for ‘making and fabrication’ and small retail units for crafts people and artisans.

Why?
• To help artists nurture and develop their careers with fully accessible, secure (literally and in terms of tenure), and affordable work space.

• To promote dialogue, mutual support, collaboration and knowledge sharing among cultural communities.

• To contribute directly and indirectly to the cultural worth of our city and the cultural offer accessible to a wide public audience.

• To recognize and build upon the value of artists as a regenerative catalyst.

What are our aims?
• To help artists nurture and develop their careers with secure (literally and in terms of tenure) and affordable work space.

• To promote dialogue, mutual support, collaboration and knowledge sharing among cultural communities.

• To contribute directly and indirectly to the cultural worth of our city and the cultural offer accessible to a wide public audience.

• To recognize and build upon the value of artists as a regenerative catalyst.

What do we believe?
• That artists enrich our world in a multitude of ways and touch the lives of many

• They support regeneration, and quality of life, by bringing individual character and colour to cities

• They choose to live on very little and are driven by a compulsion to make a better, and more expressive world rather than an unrealistic hope of earning anywhere near the UK national average wage. They work long hours without any holiday or sick pay, no pensions and most critically no security . Artists work can be very project based and hence cash flow is a constant problem, therefore secure affordable studio space along with affordable rehearsal/performance/meeting/exhibiting space is a critical keystone of the cultural industries.

• That artists often make an area more desirable simply by inhabiting it and then fall victim to unaffordable rents/freehold process when the developers move in causing constant displacement and dis-empowerment.

• That space is project power, that quantifying the net worth of the smaller cultural industries on a city and in communities is impossible.