The ‘Andover Chapel’ in St Mary’s Churchyard could get a new role as a workshop and incubator for the arts in Andover. It has been identified by ‘Andover Vision’ as a priority project in this respect as it is located close to existing cultural and educational facilities in Andover. If current plans come to fruition it will re-open in early 2009 as ‘Chapel Arts’, a centre for visual arts and crafts showcasing the finest of Andover’s and Test Valley’s talents.

Ownership of the Chapel is and will remain with Test Valley Borough Council, but under proposals currently being finalised, the management of the project will be the responsibility of Test Valley Arts Foundation in partnership with Borough and County Council. Capital funding will come from various sources including the Borough and County Council, and the Test Valley Arts Foundation itself. Applications for additional funding have been made to the Community Asset Programme (delivered by the Big Lottery Fund) and Arts Council England Grants for the Arts.

The Vision is to create ‘Chapel Arts’ as a group of thriving and dynamic incubator artists’ studios, with workshop space drawing on the heritage of the building and the surroundings; and to provide facilities for professional artists to develop their own careers alongside delivering valuable outreach workshops to the local community. This is following the example of such projects in other towns such as ‘The Colour Factory’ in Winchester.

The project’s aim is to develop and regenerate the disused Chapel to provide affordable studio space for up to three professional visual artists or crafts people and to make it accessible to the public. Resident and visiting artists would introduce and maintain a vibrant and accessible programme of events which will allow them to develop their own practice alongside community workshops. Other objectives are to engage the local community in the development of an exciting and inspirational venue through a series of artistically led events including temporary exhibitions and to create a small arts hub in partnership with a variety of institutions and organisations in and around Andover.

The plan is to let the space out, initially for between one and three years, to professional practicing artists whose art forms will complement each other and the surroundings in which they are working. The date and style of the building suggests that artists working in skills based practices would fit into the environment well, and also brings the benefit of providing a pool of skills to take out into the community. Suggestions for the type of practices that would work well within the space could be that of printmaker/painter, textile artist, jewellery artist or sculptor/ceramicist.

In return for studio space at an affordable rent the artists recruited would agree to work collaboratively as a group to manage the space and programme of events, provide outreach projects for the community, develop links with other organisations in Andover such as Andover College, the Lights theatre, Andover Museum and the Weyhill Fairground Craft Centre, and provide opportunities for other artists and artist organisations to collaborate on projects. The outreach projects would be programmed to be sympathetic to the artists being able to continue their own practice, i.e. not an overwhelming number of events.