Introduction: The creative practices of heritage

Both heritage and arts practitioners are increasingly required to work in innovative ways to overcome limited resources, and often such innovation leads to creative curatorial approaches based around partnerships between a wide range of cultural organisations and practitioners. Successive social and political events and crises in recent years have seen heritage organisations partner with creative practitioners to help them respond quickly to particular contemporary situations. In this context and beyond, the complex relationship between heritage and creative practices has begun receiving increasing levels of attention. This is not least due to the significant developments in contemporary understandings of heritage as an active ‘process’ made in the present (Smith 2006, 2012; Harrison 2013). Fouseki (2022, p.5) has expanded on the idea of heritage as a process, suggesting that we need to understand heritage as a dynamic living social practice, where heritage is not limited to an object or even event but to ideas and processes, where heritage values are ‘dynamic, complex systems of meanings and feelings’ that cannot easily be classified. This concept has become increasingly important in the context of developing further understandings of the intangibility of heritage. Alongside these shifts in understanding is the increasing recognition and visibility of creative practice within these processes (Cass et al. 2020), where creative practice is similarly a process that is socially constructed and contingent and which must also be understood in an expanded sense.