Introduction

This site has been designed to make the Artranspennine03 exhibition easily accessible, whether you are only able to visit a couple of projects, or whether you want to see everything. You can find information here about the artists and their projects, how to travel to or within the transpennine region, accommodation and other tourist information links and visitor service resources.

Projects are comprehensively listed by artist and this information can be cross referenced by location of the project. There is also exhibiton guide and map of the
artranspennine03 region.

The Exhibition
Artranspennine03 is perhaps the largest exhibition of publicly sited contemporary art ever to be held in this country. It stretches from coast to coast in a broad sweep from Liverpool in the West to Hull in the East, from Appleby-in-Westmorland, Cumbria in the North to Macclessfield in the South. It has involved over 70 artists working on 50 projects in over 50 locations and has resulted in an exhibition that occupies gardens and living rooms; docks, libraries and civic squares, flyposting sites and virtual spaces; moor tops and valleys; town centres and social clubs. Our ambition with Artranspennine03 has been to deliver contemporary public art of the very highest quality to the people of the region whilst eschewing the massive operational budget of £3million in 1998 for a mere £530 in 2003. The exhibition aims to reassert the viability of a major transregional exhibtion as a worthwhile long term project.

The curatorial rationale of the exhibition has been to select works that ‘reveal the region’ – like many other aspects of this show this is a direct lift from the curatorial objectives of the 1998 incarnation. More pertinently the desire to stage the second Artranspennine exhibtion came from the simple observation that if the ‘brand’ were permitted to fall into abeyance then the cultural momentum generated by the first Artranspennine exhibition was in danger of disappearing. Put simply this gesture is about keeping open the cultural 'Rights of Way'.

That there is a transpennine region at all is something of a bureaucratic invention. Certainly trade has flowed across the Pennines for hundreds of years but to ask people from Hull, Sheffield, Lancaster or Bolton if they belong to a region called transpennine would be to invite at least confusion if not a derisory kick in the teeth. Thus the way in which we have organised this exhibition has, in the first instance, grown out of our appreciation of artists as the primary artistic resource of the region.

We would not expect visitors to the exhibition to see it all, even in three days of concerted travelling. In fact as curators we are unlikely to see all of the projects. We do hope, however, that experiencing even one of the works in the glorious complexity of its specific context will give the viewer a significant encounter with contemporary art, a better understanding of the transpennine region and an appreciation of the true cultural capital it posseses.

Someday all biennales will be run this way.

Nick Crowe & Ian Rawlinson
Manchester, 2003