Thrive

**About Thrive** Thrive is an artist-led organisation based on two acres of land in Meare on the Somerset Levels. We create creative spaces for belonging, experimentation and connection between people, communities and the more-than-human world. Our work sits across contemporary socially engaged arts practice, ecological practice and community life. We are particularly interested in people whose experiences, identities or ways of living can leave them outside conventional cultural and social structures, and in how creative practice can help us imagine and experience different ways of being together. Thrive has grown from grassroots activity including communal Stone Soup gatherings, an Anti-Racist Walk, ecological arts projects and intergenerational community programmes. We are now developing as an artist-led organisation delivering ambitious cultural projects from our land and cabin site, bringing artists into meaningful relationships with place and local communities. We are interested in belonging: who gets to experience it, what happens when established structures don't provide it, and how artistic practice might help us make other forms of connection, kinship and mutual support. Our programme brings together contemporary arts practice, community participation and a deep attention to the landscape we are part of. Thrive is led artistically by Tessa Wills, a socially engaged artist, curator and creative producer with thirty years' experience across performance, live art, festivals, artist development and community arts practice. Tessa's practice explores desire, kinship, outsiderhood and the structures through which people make meaning and belonging. Our current work draws particular inspiration from the extraordinary starling murmurations of the Somerset Levels. These collective formations offer a way of thinking about movement, responsiveness, interdependence and alternative forms of kinship. This thinking informs Starling Oracle and our wider approach to bringing people, artists, communities and the more-than-human world into relationship. Working with Thrive means joining a developing organisation where experimentation, curiosity and relationship are valued alongside good producing practice. We welcome people who bring different forms of knowledge and experience, and particularly value lived experience of otherness and marginalisation. We are building an organisation that is rooted in its place while remaining open to new ideas, new relationships and unexpected forms of creative practice.