Vortex Creates

We transform spaces and places into bold, joyful experiences that connect, surprise and inspire.

Vortex Creates is an artist-led creative studio making joyful, bold and sometimes gloriously unexpected things happen in spaces and places.

Based in Coventry and founded by artists Marianne Taviner and Nicola Richardson in 2008, we create installations, immersive experiences, outdoor work and extraordinary transformations for cultural organisations, festivals, events, venues and public spaces.

Our roots are in Fine Art Sculpture, costume and carnival – so making, working at scale and thinking beyond the obvious are in our DNA. We like to look at a space and ask not simply what should go here? but what could this become?

And then we work out how to make it happen.

Joy has always been a thread running through our work. We create experiences that invite people to stop, look, smile, wonder, play and connect – work that feels very much at home with OutdoorArtsUK’s focus on joy, belonging, place and shared public experience.

Sometimes that has meant wrapping an entire building in an enormous bow. Sometimes it has meant creating a savanna in the middle of London, an Alice in Wonderland playground, giant sculptural costumes, colourful interventions through city streets or transforming a gallery into an immersive celebration of nature.

Our work has taken us from Coventry Cathedral to the TSB Arena in Wellington, New Zealand, and we have created work and collaborated with organisations and projects including Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry UK City of Culture, Highly Sprung, Reimagine Redditch, the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, BBC Contains Strong Language and Little Amal.

We also create our own work, including our touring exhibition JOY…inspired by nature – a sensory exploration of creativity, nature, wellbeing and the things that lift us.

Collaboration is central to Vortex. We bring together sculpture, installation, costume, performance, fabric, lighting, sound and a healthy dose of theatricality, building the right creative team around each idea.

Marianne and Nicola remain hands-on from the first slightly bonkers scribble through to making, problem-solving, installation and the final reveal.

We have nearly two decades of experience behind us, but we haven’t lost the excitement of a new space, an unusual collaboration or a brief that makes us say:

“Ooh. What could we do with that?”

Bring us a space. Let’s see what it could become.