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BACKLIT
Alfred House, Ashley St, Nottingham,
NG3 1JG

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softestatenottingham@gmail.com

Soft Estate is a term to describe the natural habitats that line roads. These edgelands offer a refuge for wildlife and a modern form of wilderness in the midst of intense urbanisation.

Formed by artists George Chinnery, Colette Griffin, and Wingshan Smith; Soft Estate will work towards building a sanctuary for collective experimentation and engagement. Whilst activated as a working studio for the collective to explore their own diverse and expanding practices, it also aims to function as a ‘living’ space fostering activity-made-viewable, seeking to demystify the process of art making and cultural production. Our desire is to cultivate a nurturing culture which endows artists and communities with creative resources, space, time, and mutual care.


George Chinnery’s interdisciplinary practice skirts the peripheries of art, poetry, design and craft; a playful apparatus to explore the basic poetic urge of placing one thing next to another, in fertile proximity. A diverse practice is unified by a persistent atmosphere of humour and melancholy. Chinnery’s intuitive vocabulary is defined by its constant flirtation with obscurity, detail and a sensitivity to language and gesture.


Colette Griffin is an artist, curator and Creative Producer whose interests centre on exploring the architecture of our lives, the institutions, interactions, actions and expectations that continue to shape everyday experiences.
Colette is currently Creative Producer (Curation) at Mansions of the Future, a dynamic project, bringing together artists and communities to share culture in and of Lincoln.


Wingshan Smith is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and educator based in the UK. Her interests lie in negotiating cultural self-hood and spirituality in an increasingly surveilled world. Whilst much of her work is auto-biographical, she more generally seeks to interact with readily forgotten histories. Current research focuses on ways ancestral esoteric practises and folk rituals can reconfigure community identity in secular settings.
Wingshan is currently the Youth Programmer at Nottingham Contemporary. She works to establish ways for young people to work within the organisation as producers of cross-art-form cultural activity, resonating with their wider social and cultural experiences.