Alison Goodyear
Alison Goodyear, recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2022-23), is an artist, freelance educator, and independent PhD researcher (UAL 2017). Goodyear works within an expanded understanding of the painting and drawing tradition; utilising XR technologies, collaborating with multiple groups and institutes, testing what can be understood as painting and drawing today. Her practice evolved through a residency at Vertigo VR, a Milton Keynes gaming centre, where Goodyear experimented with Tilt Brush and Vive VR headsets to produce virtual abstract paintings (V-AB paintings). New avenues being explored include collaborative ways of making virtual paintings, working with the public, choreographers, and dancers, as initiated whilst she was Digital Participatory Artist in Residence at QUAD Gallery, Derby (2023).
Alison’s Story – From Producer Hub to hEDs up!: A Journey in Persistence and Production
When I joined Bedford Creative Arts and IDegreeEast’s Producer Hub, I had an idea that had been growing in my practice since 2018, but I didn’t yet have the tech skills, producing knowledge or confidence to realise it. I wanted to bring together painting, virtual reality, choreography and community participation in ways that expanded upon traditional ideas of what painting could be. I also wanted to create work that was genuinely accessible, informed by my own lived experience of hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (hEDS), chronic pain and embodied uncertainty.
In 2024, the Producer Hub arrived at exactly the right moment.
The programme provided practical insight into producing, fundraising, budgeting, partnerships and project management. More importantly, it encouraged me to think differently about how ambitious ideas become achievable through careful planning, collaboration and persistence. Persistence certainly became part of the story.
Over the following two and a half years, I developed and refined my proposal through four unsuccessful Arts Council England funding applications. Each rejection became an opportunity to strengthen the project, deepen partnerships and clarify what I was really trying to achieve. It wasn’t ever easy, but each version moved the project forward. Throughout that time, the support and encouragement I received through Producer Hub remained an important reminder that producing is rarely a straight path.
In 2026, that persistence was rewarded when hEDs up! received Arts Council England National Lottery Project Grants funding, one of the first accepted under the new Digital Arts discipline.
hEDs up! is a research and development project running over four months, exploring VR paintingperformance, bringing together dancers, community participants, immersive technology specialists and health partners to investigate new ways of creating through movement, painting and virtual reality. Rather than treating accessibility as an addition, the project embeds inclusive practice from the very beginning, exploring how creative environments can adapt to different bodies, experiences and ways of moving.
The project has brought together collaborators from a wide range of disciplines, combining choreography, digital technology, painting and community participation. Working with dancers alongside people living with a variety of health conditions has created conversations and discoveries that none of us could have predicted. The research has already generated new approaches to collaborative making, practical insights into accessible workshop design, and exciting possibilities for the future development of VR painting-performance.
Looking back, Producer Hub gave me far more than producing skills. It helped me develop the confidence to build partnerships, to keep refining ambitious ideas, and to understand that producing is itself a creative practice. The role of the producer isn’t simply to organise projects; it’s to create the conditions in which ideas, people and opportunities can come together.
As hEDs up! continues to evolve, I can see the direct line between those early Producer Hub sessions and the project that exists today. I’m incredibly grateful to Bedford Creative Arts and 1DegreeEast for investing in artists not only as makers, but as producers capable of shaping and delivering ambitious, collaborative work. Sometimes the most valuable investment isn’t in a single project, but in giving someone the skills and confidence to keep going until the right project finally becomes possible.
