/ Three Ways East is in essence a collaborative arrangement of experienced culture sector professionals /
Collectively our Directors and Associates have a long history of work in which the arts and culture has been key to creating positive impacts on health, wellbeing, people and places, as well as contributing to both social and economic change.
We’re very clear that in order for artists and culture practitioners to fulfil their fullest potential in society and for society to benefit from that potential, we need to break down limiting ideas of arts and culture simply being about spectatorship, participation and artistic product.
We are interested in everything the artist has to offer and our projects explore this in four main ways:
Artist as Investigator – exploring, sharing, observing and responding to help clarify the existing characteristics, strengths and challenges within a project community. Artists can get to know the community on its own terms – the terrain of relationships, connections, skills, assets and particular problems...a kind of excavation process that will point the way to potential solutions to diverse challenges.
Artist as Social Innovator –designing creative and social processes to connect with people in the community. Artists can co-develop creative innovations - social, environmental, cultural, technological, economic - that ultimately generate social impact.
Artist as Cultural Producer - creating and co-creating artistic and social process, product and experiences with, for and in response to communities. Artists can find ways to make the arts and culture relevant and accessible to diverse people and communities.
Artist as Catalyst - applying their thinking laterally, considering how new ideas can bridge and connect people, agencies, businesses and services. Projects can be artist-led but aim to contribute to a bigger systemic solution, so the ideas developed will not be limited to artistic ones - the artist thinker is inspired by and uses many tools.
Our work aims to place artists and their full range of capabilities - artistic, emotional and intellectual – at the leading edge of the approach, allowing them to act in various ways and to design responses and interventions that are expansive, nuanced, and full of promise. We see artists as both thinkers and producers who work creatively in their own right with communities, and as catalysts that make connections with other organisations and individuals who can create change. We believe that this approach can help us understand complex, interrelated human problems more fully and illuminate how we can work arm in arm with others to ultimately develop more comprehensive, systemic or divergent solutions.