With our Young Curators’ Programme, we’re helping five Kirklees artists take the next step in their artistic career. The programme will develop talent and leadership amongst the music programmers, promoters and curators of the future. As well as receiving training and mentoring from the hcmf// team, our Young Curators will also have the chance to develop new works that can be tested within the region, and presented to audiences at a future festival. In this feature, we talk to Charlotte Roe, a Huddersfield-based artist and gig promoter. Roe was recently booking bands at venues in Dewsbury, and now interns at the DAI Hall art space. An illustrator and object-builder, she is currently interested in creating handheld sound sculptures.

Working in Dewsbury, Roe was keen to kickstart a scene for the creative outsiders of West Yorkshire, putting on a series of events across local venues. She became a regular gig promoter at her workplace, the Old Turk, and set about bridging the town’s stylistic gaps, inviting jazz bands to swing in a rock pub setting. She’s since combined her interest in programming and producing events with her increasingly experimental art practice, interning at DAI Hall – a collectively organised space located in the heart of Huddersfield town centre, where artists from West Yorkshire’s fringe scenes meet.

Now based in Huddersfield, Roe sees her curatorship at hcmf// as a chance to go all out on this weirder, more experimental side of things, embracing the side of her taste that has grown out of listening to punk and noise music. Recently she’s been doing what she describes as ‘collecting sound’, playing with contact mics to get feedback out of self-made objects. These structures range from simple, football-shaped cardboards to amplified sonic sculptures that can fit in your hand, looking something like a remote controller hollowed out and filled in with guitar amp wires. With these objects, Roe wants to put sound in our hands, exploring noise at its most tactile, giving us sculptures and asking us to treat them like instruments.

Whether making comics, sculptures or music, Roe has never seen any distinction between the types of art she makes, and would be reluctant to put one on a pedestal above the other: ‘I don’t like to see the distinction between fine art and applied art, high art and low art, and things like that’. Roe’s art is instead guided by the ways it gets picked up and interacted with, and is united by how people engage with it; ‘if there’s one thing that ties it all together, it’s an interest in technology, and how humans interact with objects’.

Faced with the interruption of Covid-19, Roe’s had to rethink the physical nature of her practice, drawing back from the ‘material culture’ that makes up her work. She plans to recreate her sound sculptures online, coding ‘avatar’ stand-ins that can be interacted with through her website. These point-and-click replacements will maintain the tactile feel they were intended to have, still existing in the hands of their audience. In a way, this challenge fits the brief Roe has imposed on herself, providing her with the chance to make a project as ‘conceptual’ as anything she’s previously worked on.

Roe’s work has slowly been moving in this direction, driving together her knack for programming with the ever-evolving art she makes herself. Having absorbed the unique sounds of Huddersfield’s underground, she’s now looking to introduce music to her artwork, creating an installation that eventually involves composers responding to her work. And she’s hoping that when the gig scene boots up again, she can do this kind of thing regularly: ‘I think that [lockdown] might encourage more of an underground spirit, a DIY thing, and I think that would be the best outcome. I hope to be a part of that by putting on gigs, events, and weird things!’.