What's new at SCAF?

Here at SCAF, 2025 has already been a busy and exciting year! As always, this time of year sees us deep into preparations for our Emerging Artist Award Exhibition. Meanwhile, our Living Landscape team has been hard at work in the community garden—taking full advantage of the recent mix of sunshine and rain, which has our plants growing at full speed! 

Keep an eye out on social media for upcoming events and to keep up to date with what we've got planned here at SCAF. We're excited to bring you a fortnightly blog post, filled with deeper insights and behind-the-scenes content of everything that is happening in our creative and community programme.

Contents:

Emerging Artist Award 2025

Northallerton Venue Closure

The Living Landscape Project

Reflecting on our mission - The Scotts

The 2025 Emerging Artist Award

One of the highlights of SCAF's calendar is always our annual Emerging Artist Award. With our ten finalists all well under way to completing their responses to the brief of 'Time'. The 2025 exhibition is set to be yet another wonderful example of creative talent sprouting in Yorkshire. In case you haven't seen, here is a recap of this years brief and our excellent finalists:

More information regarding our 2025 Emerging Artist Award Exhibition will be coming soon and we cannot wait to show off the amazing work produced by this years 10 finalists.

Northallerton Venue Closure

After a wonderful and productive chapter, our time at The Firehouse in Northallerton has come to a close. We're incredibly grateful for our time working with SKIPPKO in Northallerton and for the opportunity to use The Firehouse to showcase a number of amazing events. During our time there, we hosted two fantastic shows and a memorable artist meet-up, all of which have become cherished highlights in SCAF’s journey.

While we’re moving on from The Firehouse, this marks an exciting new phase as we focus on using and developing our own space. We’re looking forward to the new possibilities this brings and can’t wait to welcome you to what’s next!

Living Landscape Project 

SCAF is fortunate enough to hold its base within a beautiful rural stretch of land in the Thirsk countryside. With this comes a thriving plot of land on which our amazing team of volunteers plant vegetables, grow wild flowers, weed some of the more intrusive plants and maintains our beautiful green spaces. All as part of our Living Landscape Project. 

PFFA Together We Grow Initiative

We set up the Living Landscape Community Project in 2024 and now have a group of 11 volunteers from the Thirsk and Sowerby district. We have recently joined the Peoples Food and Farming Alliance’s (PFFA) new Together We Grow Community Initiative which runs for twelve months starting in April 2025. Our group is now one of 15 core teams throughout the country. Through regular meetings, we share our growing journeys and receive information and expert advice with the ultimate aim of creating local thriving food systems further down the line.

Reflecting on our mission - The Scotts

Here at SCAF, we're accelerating through the Emerging Artist Award process and heading full speed toward the finalists exhibition. Whilst engagement with emerging talent and our local community remains a vital part of our mission, we remain consistently guided by our core driving force: The Scotts and their legacy.

Michael and Eileen are at the centre of everything we do here at Scott Creative Arts Foundation. We  strive to embed their passions and beliefs into our programme and they remain the life blood that flows through our projects. Ensuring Art, Wellbeing and the Environment are at the centre of what we do is vital to our progress. Keep an eye out for our weekly insight into our archive  of Michael and Eileen's artworks, on our social media. We are looking forward to cataloguing the work and being able to invite visitors to come and browse through our extensive collection of the Scott's paintings. We cannot wait to share with you the unseen treasures of SCAF in the form of the Scotts Archive - watch this space!