Freelance Cultural Hub Coordinator
Town Hall Arts - Trowbridge Arts

Town Hall Arts is in a new phase of the 4 years of development of Trowbridge Town Hall into a centre for arts, culture and heritage learning. We are thrilled to have been successful in attracting funding from Arts Council England, Wiltshire Council and Trowbridge Town Council to build on the delivery of Trowbridge Arts, its professional performance, visual and participation programme. The work of Town Hall Arts includes hosting professional touring theatre and dance, exhibiting visual arts throughout the year, supporting the artists shop and artists’ café, running a number of performance, visual and literature based workshops, looking after the many people who hire space in the venue, as well as supporting activities out in the community and celebrating the amazing heritage of Town Hall Arts home, Trowbridge’s old Town Hall.

Job Title: Lettings Coordinator
Town Hall Arts - Trowbridge Arts

Town Hall Arts is in a new phase of the 4 years of development of Trowbridge Town Hall into a centre for arts, culture and heritage learning. We are thrilled to have been successful in attracting funding from Arts Council England, Wiltshire Council and Trowbridge Town Council to build on the delivery of Trowbridge Arts, its professional performance, visual and participation programme. The work of Town Hall Arts includes hosting professional touring theatre and dance, exhibiting visual arts throughout the year, supporting the artists shop and artist’s café, running a number of performance, visual and literature based workshops, looking after the many people who hire space in the venue, as well as supporting activities out in the community and celebrating the amazing heritage of Town Hall Arts home, Trowbridge’s old Town Hall.

Job Title: Events and Venue Assistant
Town Hall Arts - Trowbridge Arts

Town Hall Arts is in a new phase of the 4 years of development of Trowbridge Town Hall into a centre for arts, culture and heritage learning. We are thrilled to have been successful in attracting funding from Arts Council England, Wiltshire Council and Trowbridge Town Council to build on the delivery of Trowbridge Arts, its professional performance, visual and participation programme. The work of Town Hall Arts includes hosting professional touring theatre and dance, exhibiting visual arts throughout the year, supporting the artists shop and artist’s café, running a number of performance, visual and literature based workshops, looking after the many people who hire space in the venue, as well as supporting activities out in the community and celebrating the amazing heritage of Town Hall Arts home, Trowbridge’s old Town Hall.

Spread over the whole of Wiltshire, The Cloth Road is an annual art trail linking the areas of West Wiltshire that were once cloth making communities. Now in it's seventh year, the trail exhibits and celebrates the work of local artists. The last Cloth Road event began on the 8th of May 2016, and for nine days it transformed visiting the Trowbridge Town Hall into an Aladdin's cave style adventure.

Did you know there is a retrospective exhibition by Bill Goldsmith at Trowbridge Town Hall?

If you have not heard of him you may be interested to know that Bill who studied at the Royal Academy in the 1950’s, exhibited widely in the 50’s and 60’s, even with Duncan Grant and Barbara Hepworth, and his work sits in private collections from London to New York.
On the other hand, maybe you knew Bill who lectured part time at many institutions including Swindon College of Art, albeit some time ago.

Alice McNeil Presents is a semi regular youth music night hosted at the Trowbridge Town Hall, the most recent of which happened on Friday the 20th of May. The neon Where Is Your Humanity? sign from an earlier event cast a soft red glow over the proceedings, and combined with rows of fairy lights and the last of the light reflected through the town halls windows created an atmosphere similar to that of a jazz club.

Local people are being given the chance to take part in an exciting programme of free activities to help celebrate the return of the Iron Duke, a piece of industrial equipment from the former Avon Rubber factory, to Bradford on Avon.

Bristol-based performance poet Hannah Teasdale will lead one of the projects with young people. Come along to the May 8th event to hear some of her work and find out about this, and the other projects.

The original idea for The Drawing Quilts came following a visit to The American Museum in Bath, UK, by collaborative duo Quilos and the Windmill, comprising Linda Khatir and Michele Whiting. They visited the museum in preparation for a group show with Studio xyz. There they saw a particular vintage folk quilt made by early pioneer women who had left Britain and Scandinavia to begin new lives in America during the 19th Century. This quilt (shown below) became their starting point and inspiration.

At the same juncture, the artists were taking part in the Fall residency at Ox-bow (affiliated to SAIC) Michigan 2011, where they decided to create their own quilt through drawing, using brown paper, masking tape and red paint to make 121 monoprints – a significant number because it was the number of squares in the original quilt. Using ordinary materials to express ordinary things encountered during their residency reflects the methods employed by early settler women, who looked at the places and things around them, and translated this into small drawings which they then stitched.  

Quilos and The Windmill (Linda and Michele) sketched 121 things including squirrels, jumping frogs, chairs, and fire pits among other images. Having made them into simply-drawn mono-prints, and they then took 121 photographs of the finished quilt - in the forest, pine cabins, by the lake and so on.

When their residency ended they took the quilt to England and exhibited it in the American Museum, the home of its original counterpart, as part of an exhibition ‘Migrations’ by Studio xyz. The 121 photographs were also shown as part of the exhibition 'Quilos and the Windmill - counterpaine'.

In an age where World War One has passed from living memory to a distant event, there have been so many movies, books and plays written about these times that sometimes it is easy to forget that the events happened to real people with real lives. By setting the play in Trowbridge however, and showing all aspects of the war, The Boy Who Loved Apples was an educational, but also dramatic and moving play.

The Boy Who Loved Apples is the tragic story of Richard Knight, who enlists under age to fight in World War One. As we follow him in his short time in the trenches, we also see the war from the point of view of the boy's family, as well as the friends he leaves behind. In order to devise the script, the company visited the Wiltshire and Swindon history centre as well as Trowbridge museum. Lots of the dialogue throughout the play is taken from actual surviving records, and the characters are based on real people.    

Written by Thomas Hardy, and adapted for the stage by director and writer Charmaine K Parkin, Tess of the D'Urbervilles was premièred to a Trowbridge audience last weekend.

Performed in the Town Hall by the SISATA theatre company, the play was a great success, combining aspects of comedy and tragedy interspersed with humour and song. Unusually for such serious subject matter the play also included occasional audience participation, helping to engage the viewers from the very beginning.

The plan was for the show to be played out in the Sensory Gardens in Trowbridge,but rain (and wind) stopped play and we had to retreat to the warmth of Trowbridge Town Hall.