Our Venture Into Pastures New

I am leaving today for a short break in France with my family. This week has been ArtWeeks in Oxfordshire and I thought it would be a great opportunity to give you all a tour of place that we are now working. Over the past few months I have made many new friends not the least of which are those I have come to know and work alongside at the Sylva Wood Centre. This is where we have our studio and now film from. We thought up the idea of letting you meet my neighbours for yourself as best we can so we filmed many of those who now form what I see as perhaps the ‘Society’. I say that because it’s not a commune or even a community of people simply sharing what they have as such, but individual entities with their own vision for developing their own businesses but then consciously aware that creative work impacts the greater whole that many may never see as isolated entities. Here there’s a unity with many shared interests and goals as entrepreneurial spirits striving to develop ideas and at the same time a place to bounce ideas and concepts off one another and even collaborate in many diverse ways. Working as they do, and I include my work in this too, they are able to achieve objectives they might not be able to achieve so readily otherwise. This is very different and in no way compares to say a business park or an industrial complex. Much of what is shared is more an exchange; perhaps even a common barter of effort and energy that is often unquantifiable in monetary terms. This synthesising of ideas and concepts gives all the more support in a society or community of sharing, caring and such adjectives cannot really describe what takes place in such a place. So, see what you think and ask yourself if this isn’t something you might see as a business model to be emulated even on the national and even global scale to counter some of anonymity and isolationism we encounter so much in today’s working culture. Here is the video, enjoy!