Heads Bodies Legs CIC is a queer, feminist and disabled-led artist organisation creating interdisciplinary art, performance and participatory projects.
Founded by artist and director Ray Malone, Heads Bodies Legs has grown from an informal theatre and arts collective into a Community Interest Company, supporting artists to develop ambitious work while creating accessible spaces for experimentation, collaboration and public exchange.
Our work moves between galleries, theatres and cultural institutions, community spaces and site-specify sites. Projects bring together photography, performance, film, costume, sculpture, ceramics, writing and participatory practice, often exploring queer and feminist histories, ecology, folklore, disability, class and the relationship between bodies and place.
COLLECTIVE
We support artists underrepresented in the cultural sector. This includes LGBTQ+ artists, disabled and neurodivergent artists, working-class artists, older artists, parents and carers, migrant and Global Majority artists. Explore our roster of artists to learn more about their work.
COMMUNITY INTEREST COMPANY
As a CIC, we reinvest our resources into artists, access and long-term community benefit. Where possible, we provide paid opportunities, exhibition and performance platforms, professional documentation, peer exchange and introductions to cultural partners, while building sustained relationships across the arts, heritage, education and community sectors.
HOW WE WORK
We build projects through collaboration between artists, participants, researchers and cultural organisations. We believe community-led arts practice requires time, trust and a redistribution of power. Our most successful projects have developed over six to eighteen months, allowing relationships to deepen and giving participants meaningful influence over how the work evolves.
Our approach is informed by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and its emphasis on dialogue, critical consciousness and challenging unequal relationships between institutions, artists and community. We value dialogue over top-down teaching and recognise lived experience as knowledge. Heads Bodies Legs aims to create conditions where participants can question dominant narratives, identify the structures shaping their lives and contribute to the artistic and political direction of a project.
THE COMMONS
The climate crisis is intensifying alongside war, displacement, widening inequality and the erosion of legal and civic protections. As public systems become more fragile, the commons, by which we mean shared spaces, resources and forms of mutual care, become increasingly neccessary. We see cultural work as part of this shared infrastructure: a way to gather, organise, exchange knowledge and build forms of care and solidarity capable of sustaining communities through crisis.
ACCESS
We centre the access requirements of our collaborators and aim to represent those who have faced barriers in their work and participation in the arts. We actively showcase work from underrepresented communities and invite everyone we work with to consider accessibility of their work and creative process.
We embrace the idea of disability gain, the way creative practice can expand through disabled-led approaches to access. For us, accessibility is a site of possibility, innovation and shared learning, which strengthens our relationships and the work itself.
PAY
Artists should be paid fairly for their work. We are members of Artists’ Union England and share its commitment to fair pay, artists’ rights and sustainable and equitable working practices.