Open afternoons: Wednesday 6 and Thursday 7 August 2025, 1-4pm
Amelia will spend her time on the residency developing a body of work about a dissatisfied customer, stuck in an apparently endless loop of conversations with a series of call centres. Print diagrams, short videos and a movement score will all be tested as ways to represent the encounter between a customer and a corporation.
Amelia will use The Everybody Gallery to try out ways of installing works-in-progress, and to generate new ideas for where to take the project next. The work stems from Amelia's own experience of trying to claim flight delay compensation. She has been working with 3 dancers – Tora Hed, Inari Hulkkonen and Yuma Sylla – to develop movements to express the frustrations of this experience. Alongside this a series of accompanying diagrams recount the narrative in fragmented, recursive form.
So far, Amelia has explored the call-centre conversations from the point of view of an exasperated customer. At Everybody Arts she wants to shift perspective and to also consider the experience of call centre workers. Arguably the caller and the customer services agent both represent a form of diminished agency. Call centres and air travel represent a promise of connection and mobility that is not always borne out in practice.
About the Artist
Amelia Crouch is an artist based in Bradford. Her work usually begins with words, as either content or inspiration. Outcomes take the form of moving image, performance and print artworks. Her current work uses collaged speech and performed gesture to explore and critique qualities of individualism, self-management and resilience that she sees as underpinning neoliberalism's ideal 'self.' Addressing a serious topic with dry humour, her work intends to subvert neoliberal messaging and instead to promote a view of identity that is social and embodied.
The approach taken in Amelia's current work has been informed by prior projects with The Art House (2014), Pavilion (2015) and Coventry Artspace (2016). In these past pieces she paired language culled from etiquette guides, corporate manuals and sociological essays with repetitive movements mimicking team building exercises, walking styles or work capacity tests. This work has been recognised in screenings and exhibitions at Holden Gallery, Manchester (2019), A Plus A Gallery, Venice (2017), The Tetley, Leeds (2016), The Calder at Hepworth, Wakefield (2015) and Zeppelin Film, Melbourne (2015). Amelia holds an MA Fine Art from Manchester Metropolitan University and BA (Hons) Fine Art from the University of Leeds and has recently started a part-time practice-based PhD at University of the Arts, London.