A SPARK with Big Car

Returning to Big Car Collaborative in Indianapolis in November 2025 marked ten years since my first visit to the Tube Factory campus, and the start of what have become many conversations, exchanges, and shared reflections over time. Being back to help it prepare for its ten-year celebrations created space not only to recognise what has been built, but to pause and think about what that longevity means in practice.

Spending time with the Big Car team during that moment of consolidation brought a particular clarity. The Tube Factory, and the wider campus that has grown around it, is no longer an experiment or an early-stage intervention. It is an established, artist-led civic presence, carrying responsibilities as well as possibilities. Engaging again with SPARK, Big Car’s long-term public space initiative, sharpened that realisation. SPARK is not a project layered onto downtown, but an approach rooted in staying, tending, and taking responsibility for place over time.

That return visit prompted a period of reflection. In the weeks that followed, I wrote two blog posts for Big Car focused on SPARK.

Those posts focus on SPARK as a long-term, artist-led approach to public space, exploring how it has evolved in practice. They reflect on the day-to-day realities of working in and with public space over time, including relationships, care, maintenance, and the cumulative effects of staying present rather than delivering discrete projects.

Those reflections, in turn, fed directly into a larger piece of work that I will be sharing later this week: Artist-Led Regeneration: Definition, Standards and the Case for Stewardship. The paper revisits and widens earlier thinking, shaped by a decade of observing Big Car’s evolution and by the questions raised through SPARK’s practice in public space.

For now, the two SPARK blog posts are available here. They are offered as part of an ongoing conversation about what it means for artists to take long-term responsibility for the places they help to shape.