Our Approach
Working with architects, developers and clients, we aim to integrate art, public realm, architecture and great design for high-profile public and private sector clients.
We are interested in places, narratives and placemaking and our work often looks to explore and celebrate these themes through site specific and responsive public art programmes, commissions and events. We are developing site specific approaches to collaboration, co-production and co-creation to ensure a relevant people based outcome.
Our practice combines a careful dedication to understanding places with imaginative approaches to projects that meaningfully connect with people.
We are committed to developing and ensuring a best practice approach for clients and communities. Working with architects, developers and clients who share these objectives and supporting artists in this process. Where possible local conversations and collaboration are central to our approach.
The Team
Bridget Sawyers Art Consultants are a small team of experts drawing on their individual experience, specialist knowledge and training in art and architecture.
The team have been working together on various projects over the last few years including on the Thames Tideway Tunnel Art Programme with over thirty artists and designers.
Our understanding of place is situated in our knowledge of making and producing and collaborating, having worked with many architects, artists, designers and others to realise small and large-scale art and building projects, masterplans and infrastructure projects.
Bridget Sawyers
Director
Bridget is a qualified architect and urban designer, providing a valuable insight into the design, planning and construction sector and how to successfully integrate arts and culture. Since 2001 has run this consultancy, operating in the area where art and architecture meet; including preparation and delivery of public art strategies, cultural audits, best practice guidance and arts feasibility studies.
She works as a producer and project manager with artists and curators on site-specific commissions, art and cultural strategies, creative engagement and consultation. Bridget has managed and delivered high profile public art programmes and commissions, arts and cultural conferences, events and symposia. Including project management of fabrication and installation of public art commissions directly for artists. She undertakes research in these areas.
Over a 30-year career, Bridget has played a key advisory role in policy recommendations, strategic planning and urban design frameworks, and in the advocacy of design quality. She has advised national Government; Arts Councils of England, Scotland and Wales; regional government and local authorities; project managed and delivered several high-profile international conferences; and managed a £1m global prize for engineering. She was the CEO of the Architecture Centre Network, the support organisation for the architecture and built environment centres in the UK, funded by Arts Council England and Cabe.
She was a Director of Project Compass CIC which endeavoured to advance better procurement culture and practice in architecture and the built environment.
Gemma Lloyd
Associate
Gemma is an independent curator with two decades of experience in commissioning, exhibition-making, publications and catalogues, artist residencies and public events. She has curated exhibitions for Czarna Galeria, Warsaw; Kunstraum, London; The Living Art Museum, Reykjavik; Ferens Art Gallery and Hull Maritime Museum and worked closely with the artists Emma Hart, Jonathan Baldock and John Walter on the production of new work and projects.
Her most recent projects include Earth Spells: Witches of the Anthropocene at RAMM, Exeter and living in fear of quicksand – a solo exhibition by Maria Amidu at the Nunnery and Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives in London.
She is an English language copy editor for the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Nida Art Colony, the publishing house Two Silences, and the biannual magazine *as a Journal. Gemma is an associate of Daily Life Ltd. and DACS and has worked on the archives of Alison Wilding, Tess Jaray, Susanna Heron and Bobby Baker. She studied Fine Art at Nottingham Trent
Louise Trodden
Associate
Louise is a curator who collaborates with artists, cultural organisations, and design teams to develop more sustainable places. For the past twenty-five years, she has directed long-term cultural initiatives for major infrastructure, public realm, and development projects in London, including positions at HS2 Ltd and East Bank at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
Her skills encompass cultural strategies, design assurance, public art initiatives, meanwhile projects, and research-driven design initiatives. Her recent work includes circular economy projects that foster skills and exchange across the culture and the built environment sectors.
She trained as a curator at the Royal College of Art and is presently enrolled part-time in the postgraduate certificate programme for Sustainability Leadership in the Built Environment at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership.
Associate
Ania is an artist, writer and creative producer who creates situations that support dialogue and exchange and question existing frameworks of participation. She is interested in how narratives shape understanding, mythology and knowledge of places and people. Her work is presented through text, events, walks, performances, objects and publications.
Educated at Open School East, London and Warsaw University, Poland she is a visiting lecturer at Central School of Speech and Drama and Chelsea College of Art & Design. She is a co-founder of The Walking Reading Group. Her first novel, Odd Hours, was published in 2022 by Welbeck Publishing Group.
Previous Associates:
Ciara Brennan
Rachel Fleming-Mulford
Ana Ospina
Vivienne Reiss
Kate Squires
Kathryn Standing
Associate
Kathryn is a visual arts specialist with extensive experience in contemporary practice. Her work has included curatorial and programme management within the public realm and in gallery contexts, alongside arts policy and strategic development with Arts Council England (ACE), British Council, and local authority councils.
Throughout the various roles undertaken, the forging of relationships between artists, people and places has been fundamental to her approach and continues to be sustained through her current involvement with public art projects, in conjunction with other visual art assignments.
We are part of this international movement of individuals and organisations in the cultural sector declaring climate and ecological emergency