Our canvas is Leeds, the buildings and streets, the city’s people, artists and arts companies.
As part of Artists taking the lead, one of the national projects of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, we have been able to invite the Brothers Quay to come and play with that canvas, to create something with us that will alter the way we see the city, something people will remember as part of being here in Leeds, in Yorkshire.
They have proposed a large scale work, taking place in May next year, which will explore the flow of people and water through the city. They are interested in how, from out of the anonymous and everyday, myth suddenly erupts and transforms space into another dimension and then subsides, leaving the everyday altered and somehow different.
Remarkably, Leeds Canvas is the first collaboration between eight of the city’s key arts organisations. Our hope is that, building on the opportunity of the 2012 Olympiad, we will be able to invite artists to prepare this canvas every four years for as far into the future as we can imagine.