Making Diamonds From Air

The Artist As Alchemist: Failure and Imagination

A multi-disciplinary art project, exploring the artistic processes and legacy of regional and international award-winning, Tina Gharavi, based in Newcastle from 1996-present.

This is a daring, self-reflective project that explores an artist’s creative process in order to emphasise the role of funding in the production of art, in the development of artistic processes, in the co-opted funding speak that artists need to learn in order to sustain their practice.

Using past funding applications as literal and figurative fuel, Gharavi reinvents her new artform by creating a piece of art produced through burning past project ideas, offer letters and rejected proposals and applications. This process is also about digitization and the paperless society that failed to emerge.

Making Diamonds From Air will offer viewers access to the organic, raw material of an artist’s creative process, while also posing questions around creative vision, commercial value, state-funded art and the value of arts in an increasingly restricted funding landscape.

A series of community engagement workshops with young people exploring learning and self-growth through digital narratives of failure.