About Us

IOU is a leading producer of interdisciplinary site-specific contemporary art.

Our aim is to make original innovative productions, support and develop artists and engage local communities and public audiences. We are inventive, imaginative and distinctive. IOU is made up of a creative team with a core group of six members. We work closely with a whole host of other creatives, commissioned artists, makers and producers to create what people know and love, as IOU.

Our aim is to find original and imaginative ways to present work and engage audiences.

We develop and explore the dynamism of co-creating and making; combining traditional skills and experience with pioneering new technology, engineering expertise and scientific enquiry.  Working with the disciplines of live performance, music, video and installation we share our extensive knowledge and experience to encourage and assist new generations of artists and creative people.  

We site and create artworks for unexpected locations indoors and out as well as theatres and galleries. Our productions cross the boundaries between art forms and organisations, playing with reality and confounding expectations; inviting with the familiar and guiding to the unknown. We take inspiration from the culture, landscape and industrial past of our home in Calderdale, combining making skills and emerging technology. 

Experiencing IOU is an inclusive process of hands-on inventing, learning and active participation, where audiences bring their own perspective. We sow the seeds for new ideas to grow, life-affirming memories to be made and multiple stories to be told.

Our Purpose - why we do it.

‘Dreaming in the real world’  – we all need to dream, to make and create. IOU invites audiences and collaborators to be travellers in a borderless landscape of the imagination, to find the joy, the surprise, the unresolved and the humour of creativity.

We believe that real change starts with imagination.

Partners and Funders

MEET OUR FUNDERS

"IOU's achievement in galvanising an intense, childlike response and reawakening our sense of wonder, is considerable"

The Independent

Our Values.

Inventive

We invent new artworks from scratch. We take risks, expand our knowledge, learn from each other and empower others to develop their creative practice. We turn ideas into reality. 

Adaptable

We are flexible, able to change direction and adjust what we do to be relevant to our audiences and communities.

Curious

We are welcoming and accessible. We aim to ignite curiosity and encourage audiences and collaborators to bring their own experiences to our artworks and to co-create with us.

Intersectionality, Equity & Inclusivity.

We will be a company informed by a practical understanding of intersectionality. Intersectionality is an analytical framework for understanding how aspects of a person’s social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. We will position ourselves as welcoming and accessible to all. 

 

 

Young people, Change-makers, The Next Generation.

We care about the next generation and their futures. We will support young talent without traditional qualifications. We will use art of our time to influence the future.