is a not-for-profit cooperative of artists, whose members are writers, visual artists, makers, performers and musicians. We work with text, music, performance, film and the visual arts, in a variety of contexts with a huge range of people. We also bring artists from abroad to the UK, to play a part in our projects and to work and teach around the country. Most of our projects involve some kind of collaboration, between artists and between art forms.
We disseminate work produced in our projects in all sorts of ways, through publishing, both in print and online, as CDs and CD Roms, as digital videos, and through exhibitions, installations and performances.
You'll find information about all our activities on our site somewhere, and we hope you enjoy looking. Please get in touch if you want more information about our work.
Art is a part of everyone's experience. When we were little, we never thought we couldn't paint or sing or dance or make up stories, and when we did these things we never thought there was a right way or a wrong way. The Word Hoard tries to rediscover that freedom. We try to help people use the arts as a tool for life, to give them access to art as a process, not just as a product, regardless of their class, race, age, religion, gender, ability or sexual orientation. So we try to treat all people equally but we don't for a minute think they are all alike. To us, difference can be a source of inspiration and comfort, and it's from each person's unique qualities that art is made.
The process doesn't end there though, because it's from each person's unique qualities that a community is made too. Art's about learning respect for others along with self-respect; it's a way to make people aware of how much we can achieve if we work together. Everyone can make art, but they make better, more useful art if they work alongside others. How? Look at our site for a few suggestions.
I hesitate to use words like cutting edge, edgy, or even innovative, as they have become - in North America, in any case - part of that "Dare to be different" vocabulary that is really urging you to be just the same. At the same time, most 'edgy' art in any form is usually a rehash of the old with just enough hooks, as they say in advertising, to let you know you are a member of an exclusive group. And while The Word Hoard is both cutting edge and innovative, it is not exclusive. It is both of its time and of its place, conscious of social interaction and social exclusion, and that word we all try so hard to avoid - class. In both the work of its members and the workshops offered by them what distinguishes the Word Hoard from other groups called cutting edge is their dedication both to spontaneity and to discipline, to the crafting of the moment so that what comes from it is so formally strong that it must have influence in the form tomorrow will take. To work with The Word Hoard is to experience this. It is not to learn a formula for what was judged innovative last year, last month, or even last week, but to hone the tools of one's mind and one's craft until the process of innovation, of making new as well as making strange, is one with the process of insight.
