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SLART and I are thrilled to launch The Brut List, Studio BRUT's new directory celebrating outsider artists working across Swindon and Wiltshire. Outsider art (or art brut, "raw art") is work made outside the mainstream art world: self-taught, unfiltered, and driven by instinct rather than institution. It's about time our region had a home for it. Our first five artists make the case for why this list needed to exist. A Swindon sculptor carving reclaimed timber. An artist w

Making Swindon's Outsider Artists Impossible to Ignore I've lost count of the number of conversations I've had with project facilitators, curators, and organisers who all say some version of the same thing: "We just don't know where to find the artists." And every time, it stings a bit, because I know exactly why. The problem Right now, if you're looking for artists in Swindon, the pool of information is small and split into niche little pockets. What does exist, is amazing,

Thank You, Cass Art: Why Studio Brut Is Proud to Call You a Partner There's a particular kind of relief that comes when someone says yes to you not because they have to, but because they genuinely believe in what you're building. That's exactly what happened when I reached out to Cass Art to ask if they'd support Studio Brut, the new outsider artist studio I'm co-founding with SLART here in Swindon. They said yes. And not just a polite, token yes, Cass Art has come on board a

First Day in the Studio I'm sat here in the bare bones of our studio. No supplies have arrived yet. There's a mismatched dotting of furniture around the place, my horde of 300 paintings propped up against a wall waiting for the racking to arrive, and I have stolen Steve's big poofy cushion to plop myself down on the floor with. Today was my first full day in the space. The plan was to sort through my boxes, folders, piles of canvases, and try to get my head around creating so

The Threads: Moving 300 Paintings Out of My Home I didn't expect this part to be the hard part. Since my art career began, I've painted at home. Every piece I've made has lived in the same walls I live in, stacked in corners, leaning against furniture, hung wherever there was space. So when the time came to move into Studio Brut, it wasn't just a studio move. It was moving 300 paintings out of my home, all at once. I knew it would be logistically a lot. I didn't expect it to

Designing Studio Brut Around Accessibility... So, we have a space. The question that came next: what do we actually want this place to be set up? For Steve and me, that question had one answer before we'd even finished asking it. Accessibility. Art needs to be accessible. Accessible to people, real people , and that has to include disability. It's not an add-on for us, or a box to tick. It's personal and heartfelt. Why this is personal It's a fairly quietly known fact that

BOLD RAW UNTRAINED TALENT, A New Habitat for Outsider Art in Swindon For the past few years I've been chasing the same thing: a studio space of my own. Not a corner of a spare room, not a borrowed table, a proper space to make work in. I've applied, asked, and knocked on doors more times than I can count, and almost every time the answer has come back the same way: funding. Studio space costs money, and the kind of funding that gets outsider artists like me through the doo