Townley and Bradby
Between 2003 and 2018 Townley and Bradby made work as a collaborative practice. Initially their work was located in the public realm, included a game that made use of a grid of market stalls (Market Pac-man, 2010), a public promenade round all of the giant supermarkets encircling Norwich (Cakewalk, 2007) and then round those encircling Cambridge (Cakewalk, 2009), and a performance walk linking the city’s morgue with the crematorium (Dust, 2006).
For Invisible Dust, Townley and Bradby developed ‘The Bowthorpe Experiment’, an event that was at once a mobile think-tank, a free-wheeling utopia, and a bike ride to the future. A collaboration between Townley and Bradby, Magnificent Revolution, and Jonathan P Watts, it took place on three evenings as part of the 2011 Norfolk and Norwich Festival. The tour travelled from Norwich city centre out to Bowthorpe, a development on the western edge of Norwich. En route, the tour used music and stirring speeches to imagine the future as it might be if the benefits enjoyed in Bowthorpe (safe cycle routes separate from the motor traffic, plentiful parks, social housing and private housing) were rolled out across the rest of the city.
Arriving in Bowthorpe itself, the members of Magnificent Revolution unpacked and set up their bike-powered cinema system from two bike trailers. The final act of visioning was to project a short prophetic film onto the gable end of a supermarket.
Between 2011 and 2018 Townley and Bradby focused their practice on the triple requirements of how to earn a living, bring up children, and also sustain a creative practice. They did this through residencies (most recently Playing Out with MK Gallery), research fellowships (Golden Threads), and an Arts Council-funded project called Artists As Parents As Artists.