Always on
This project successfully funded on 22nd November 2025, you can still support them with a donation.
Southview accessible creative residency
Dunoon, Argyll and Bute Council, United Kingdom
Aim
Making our art residency wheelchair accessible and available to as wide range of abilities as possible
Seatree is a small ceramic art business tucked away on the beautiful Cowal peninsula in South Argyll, Scotland. We make art that combines poetry and pottery in an ongoing attempt to live creatively and sustainably. We love to share our space with others and an opportunity has arisen to establish a creative retreat and workshop space within the woodland, for artists, writers, musicians and craftspeople of all kinds. This will comprise of two small low impact buildings, made deliberately to sit within the woodland as kindly as possible. One will be a workshop space, the other a tiny living space.
Funding for this project is really tight, but we are determined to make our retreat space as available to people who might previously have been excluded from these places as possible. This includes wheelchair users or with other mobility challenges. This crowdfunding bid is a reach out to artists and art lovers who think like us, and want to include not exclude.
Specifically, this is about the additional costs of making the space accessable.
The first challenge is about access to the site, which is located on steep ground in the midst of oak and birch trees. Our plan is to install a carefully graded and well-lit pathway that is navigable by wheelchair, and easily transited by people who have other mobility problems.
Next are the buildings themselves. Making these accessible incurs a number of other costs, ranging from wider access doors, wheelchair accessible toilets, hand rails and lower level cooking facilities.
We also intend to do an audit with wheelchair users when the building is completed and then retrofitting and learning that comes from this process.
Finally, in order to make this building accessible, we are very aware that many artists and creatives are excluded from making use of spaces like ours because of cost and the complex nature of the way privilege operates within the art world. It is our intention to make this available to people who are outside this privilege by offering a number of free or low cost opportunites throughout the year.
Funding method
Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made