BRISTOL DIVING SCHOOL is a collaborative group, established in 2009, working across a multidisciplinary field of practices. The collective model is analogous to the notion of a franchise as with each year the group extends to accommodate another graduating generation of artists and creative practitioners from across the South West of England and Wales.

The collective ethos is united in the shared assertion of a collaborative authorship positioning all production and public discourse under the BRISTOL DIVING SCHOOL banner. This eradicates the identities of affiliated individuals and creates an anonymous elitism in the process. With three generations of artists working under the same name, similar models of methodologies and shared ideologies, the collective attempts to manifest its own cultural identity and artistic discourse.

This approach to art making and authorship questions the ethics of the art market, contesting the infrastructures of institutional and academic policies by creating an alternative representation of an artist’s practice.

Responsibility is split between the operating of the gallery and studio space, central Bristol, and collaborative projects with other artist led spaces beyond Bristol both nationally and internationally. The latter of the detailed activity primarily concerns the previous two generations who now operate independently of the BRISTOL DIVING SCHOOL site (this includes ourselves).

References from anthropological methodologies, the Art and Crafts movement, cinematic landscape, youth sub-cultures and their ideologies and politically fragmented moments of history are fundamental to the collective BRISTOL DIVING SCHOOL practice. Self-instigated projects often culminate in compartmentalised elements that examine the fabrication of societies and artefacts and question the dramatisation, mythologisation and failings of these processes.

Since handing the premises over to the current third generation in August 2011, BRISTOL DIVING SCHOOL has been actively engaged with collaborative projects having recently exhibited in Linz, Austria and with forthcoming projects both in Birmingham and Plymouth, England. Whilst we continue to establish the collective identity and its affiliation with other artist-led groups and organisations, there is a prolific programme of events being staged at the gallery space that continues to expand and create a discourse of local, Bristol-based discussion around the BRISTOL DIVING SCHOOL model.