We are proud to support local events, co-present events, and provide creative outlets for our local community.
​We do this year round. We believe that creativity should be part of our lives all the time, not just during festival season. Our festival is a celebration of national and international artists, but creativity begins at home.
If you are a local artist looking for support, information, or links to creative hubs and events in the area, get in touch.

HANNAH HONEYWILL

Based at The Egg Factory in Hebden Bridge Hannah is an artist and furniture restorer. She combines these skills when she creates sculptures. 

In 2019 Hannah created a newly commissioned sculptural installation 'The Golden Aerialist' for Hebden Bridge Arts Festival and the National Trust at Hardcastle Crags.​

Follow the trail of 5 flat sculptures through Hardcastle Crags to discover the hanging sculpture 'The Golden Aerialist'. The exhibition continues in Gibson Mill as part of this exciting collaboration between artist Hannah and photographer Andrew Sharp. 

MAGPAHI

Alison Cooper is the otherworldly voice and vision behind the fairytale folk of Magpahi - vocals and multi-instrumentalist. 
The Lancashire native’s whimsical acoustics and sepia stories have been quietly ebbing and flowing on the fringes of folk for a decade.

During the 2016 Festival, we presented ‘I am no bird’ a short film comprising archive footage (from the Yorkshire Film Archive) of women at work and play accompanied by a soundtrack by Alison Cooper, music made using a mixture of acoustic and electronic instruments and inherited objects.

In 2018 we commissioned Alison to write two new songs inspired by the diary of local suffragette Lizzie Berkeley which were presented at the Hope Baptist Chapel during our Weekend of Wonderful Women event. Alison was accompanied by musician Pam Hulme. They both performed as part of the 2019 Festival along with Sophie Cooper and Jo Kennedy to launch ‘The Valley’, a local Calderdale Sound Women Network project.

Based in Todmorden and Hebden Bridge, Calderdale Sound Women Network is a loose collective with a shared interest of sound and music in all its forms. Meeting roughly once a month during which plans for projects are hatched and experiences shared.

DEBBIE SHARP

Debbie Sharp is a Multi-disciplined Queer Artist, Curator, Activist, and co-Founder of The Penthouse an artist-led LGBTQ+ contemporary art organisation who’s curatorial and research projects are focused on Queer art, Dyke tactics and radical practices. 

In 2019 artist Debbie has been working with West Yorkshire Queer Stories and has created a silent disco which takes extracts from the oral histories and mixes them with disco music. Debbie is also placing some of the oral histories into the map chair situated in the town hall, so grab a cuppa & have a listen.​ 

In 2018 Debbie brought us her 'speakHer' sculpture which consisted of oral histories celebrating the 100 year anniversary of the Representation of the People Act.