I've had the pleasure of working with YARA+DAVINA across the second iteration of MANIFEST, the AHRC-funded Policy Lab programme that embeds artists in government and local authority policy teams. Their placement at Adur and Worthing Councils has been one of the most carefully constructed, rigorously executed and creatively conceived pieces of work MANIFEST has hosted.

Working with them. From the first scoping conversation, Yara and Davina treated the placement as a piece of serious inquiry rather than a commission to be delivered. They asked good questions, and listened generously - about what the Council actually needed, about what policy problems might be surfaced through a participatory method, about where their artistic practice could do real work and where it couldn't. That intellectual seriousness combined with genuine openness and responsiveness is rare. It set the tone for everything that followed. They are professional, warm, punctual, and they treat public servants with the same care they would treat any other public they work with. I found them easy to work with even when the work itself was hard.

Working with the community. The participatory approach underpinning CLOCKWORK - the thirteen wall clocks commissioned for the Town Hall - is a model of how to gather material from a busy workforce without extracting from it. They ran sessions of varying durations, including five-minute sessions designed around the real time pressures council staff face, and used sensory, dialogic and fun methods to draw out statements about what the public sector values and what productivity actually means to the people inside it. Every statement on every clock face came from a member of council staff. The artwork is, in the most literal sense, made of the organisation it now hangs inside.

How they talk about their work publicly, and how it reflects on MANIFEST. This matters to me as lead artist for the MANIFEST programme. YARA+DAVINA talk about the work with accuracy and care. They don't overclaim. They're generous about host collaborators, honest about what the artwork is and isn't doing, and articulate about the questions the work opens up. When they presented at the Somerset House work-in-progress showcase in February 2025, and on the panel at Demos with Polly Curtis, Catherine Howe, Kieran Sheehan and Clare Ainsworth, they modelled exactly the kind of public voice MANIFEST hopes its artists will develop - intellectually confident, open to the policy audience, and entirely their own.

Rigour. Behind CLOCKWORK sits ten+ months of participatory research, iterative prototyping, negotiation with facilities and procurement, and genuine conceptual work on how a public artwork can carry content gathered from an organisation back to the organisation itself as a live provocation. They read widely, listened carefully, and built proposals that answered the brief rather than imposing a pre-existing practice.

Agility and adaptability. The placement shifted several times, not least because of the surprise General Election, as well as more local dynamics. YARA+DAVINA absorbed each of those changes without losing the integrity of the work. They're experienced enough to know when to hold the line on a creative decision and when to flex — and they tend to make the right call.

Listening. This is what I will remember most. Catherine Howe has described the collaboration as creating "space to imagine" inside tough and exhausting work. That only happens because YARA+DAVINA listen with unusual quality of attention. Staff said things in those sessions they would not have said in other formats. Public audiences at Somerset House repeatedly noted the emotional honesty of the work — "opening our hearts up — emotion in policymaking," as one attendee wrote in our evaluation.

Quality and legacy. CLOCK WORK will be installed permanently across Adur and Worthing Councils' buildings. It will outlast the placement. The value to the Council — surfacing its own values, deepening its design principles, giving staff a daily material prompt to think about how they spend their time — is substantial and enduring. For MANIFEST, their placement has generated some of the strongest evidence we have that artists can make durable, well-made, publicly legible contributions to the internal culture of a policymaking organisation. I would recommend them unreservedly.

Stephen Bennett 

Co-head of Policy Lab and Deputy Director