UK: Latitude Festival has teamed up with Will Hardie, the master craftsman behind Channel 4’s Amazing Spaces and Shed of the Year, plus the creative minds behind Electric Picnic festival’s Trailer Park, to launch an art caravan competition. Grants of up to £2000 will be available for creators to invent, design, build and host their own caravan or mobile structure at this year’s Latitude. The best ideas will be developed for a new ‘mobiletropolis’ set within the festival.
A judging panel led by designer, maker, artist and craftsman, Will Hardie, will read proposals. Joining Roz and Hugo Jellett, the creative directors of Trailer Park, they will choose the best ideas (or the best sounding creators) and work with them to bring the designs into being. Winners will be invited with a team of friends to host the creation at Latitude.
Will Hardie commented: “I’m delighted to be in involved in this competition. I love that Trailer Park supports people’s passion and vision to turn the humble caravan into wonderful and wacky creations, and where better to do this than at a festival where all can be entertained and inspired?
“The British Isles are home to so many creative and eccentric individuals who demonstrate incredible vision, ingenuity and skill in the wacky projects they build at home. This is a chance to bring your crazy inventions to one of the brightest and most creative festivals around!”
Artists, architects, theatre-makers, performance groups and creators of all sorts are being invited to submit their most amazing designs, and up to 10 grants (between £400 and £2000) are being offered for this year’s festival. Entrants can turn a caravan (or something with wheels that can come and go) into something ‘implausibly wonderful’, and Latitude will give it a home from home in the brand-new Trailer Park area.
Hardie added: “Festivals are such explosions of fun and creativity, a place where for a few days we can let our hair down and go wild, a place where the extraordinarily eccentric and unique almost become normal! The combination of creativity, caravans and festivals is a winner.
“I’m always astounded by the passion with which folk adapt and embellish their caravans. There is a huge community that is wild about these humble structures and this is a competition that celebrates this quirky world without limits.”
Although Trailer Park is new to Latitude, in Ireland over 60 creators have been given grants to help them realise their wildest ideas for Festival Republic’s Electric Picnic festival.
