Artists Luca Rutherford and José García Oliva will be joining Metal at an exciting time to work on national arts programmes in 2025, Artists For Future Policy and The Power and Cultural Democracy Commission.

The Power & Cultural Democracy Commission will develop a model bringing together intersectional communities across Liverpool, Southend and Peterborough, exploring issues of collective significance. The focus of this commission is loneliness, informing the next phase of Metal’s 10-year programme, The Unlonely City.
Artists For Future Policy will empower artists to develop socially engaged policy. Breaking down conventional policy language, the programme looks to reconstruct and create accessible, creative and inclusive policies for arts organisations dedicated to positive social change
Luca Rutherford is our lead artist for Power & Cultural Democracy Commission, working across our three sites to bring conversations to the national stage. Based in Newcastle, an associate artist of ARC Stockton, Cambridge Junction and a movement practitioner with Frantic Assembly, Luca makes work that sparks conversations inside and outside of theatre spaces. Their artistic vision is to create work that is softly fierce and fiercely soft, and their practice revolves around the creation of community, holding space for conversation, humour and play. Luca makes work that is accessibly experimental in form and rooted in intersectional feminism; and in content explores, plays with, and questions the messy. It is for the adventurous, and also the shy.



Within the Power & Cultural Democracy Commission, Luca is holding the question ‘in a world that capitalises on us desensitising ourselves, how do we help each other resensitise?’. Exploring the question within the power of softness really excites us. Learn more about Luca and see some of her previous work here.
José García Oliva is our first Artists For Future Policy commissioned artist. José’s research-led practice focuses on collective making and exploring contemporary forms of labour. The outcomes of his work often involve enactments of social exchanges or provocations, shaped by cultural iconography, site-specificity, and the people he collaborates with. 24 Co-ordinates, 2024 is a two-year project born from conversations with security staff and porters about feelings of loneliness and invisibility, inviting 34 participants to collaboratively create a cyanotype artwork using their torches to trace constellations symbolising their patrol routes, blending themes of individual effort, collective impact, and the often-unseen nature of their labour. José is a Venezuelan artist based in London and is currently the course leader for the MA in Visual Communication at Ravensbourne University and an associate lecturer at Kingston School of Art and Central Saint Martins.



José will be responding to how Metal can be more welcoming in all senses to help us shape our policy ‘Metal Welcome’. As part of José’s commission, he will lead a paper-folding exercise that invites us to rethink and share our perceptions of borders/barriers. Through this hands-on activity, we’ll engage with the paper to explore and embody ideas of openness, care, and inclusion making Metal a more welcoming environment. Explore José’s artist profile here
Luca and José are busy shaping their ideas for these projects and will be bringing them to our sites very soon. Stay tuned for more updates and ways you can get involved.
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