Who makes Setting Out, and how
Where this domain comes from
Setting Out continues the theme this domain carried from 2000 to 2025: commissioning public art (UK).
From 2000 to 2025 this domain was the home of "Art in Partnership, Edinburgh", run by its original owner. The domain was acquired in 2026 and Setting Out is now an independent publication on the same theme, with no relation to the previous owner.
Setting Out did not exist before 2026; the years above belong to the former site, not to this one.
Setting Out is an independent, non-commercial reference published at a web address that a different organisation used in the past. It is not that organisation, has no connection to it and claims no continuity with it. It commissions nothing, represents no artist, and sells nothing.
Setting Out is an independent reference on the commissioning of public art in the United Kingdom. It exists because the process is documented in fragments, mostly inside the organisations that run it, and almost never in one place that a first-time commissioner or a first-time applicant can read straight through.
What this site is not
It is not an agency. It does not commission work, manage projects, represent artists, broker introductions, or sell anything. It names no consultancy, no fabricator and no artist as a recommendation, and it does not rank anybody. Where a real body is named, it is named because a reader needs to know that the body exists and what it does.
The domain
This web address was used in the past by a different organisation. Setting Out is a new and separate project with no ownership of, affiliation with, endorsement by, or continuity to that organisation or any prior owner. It uses no former name, no former branding, and makes no claim to any former work. Links that arrive here expecting the earlier site have reached a different thing, and this page is the plainest way to say so.
How the pages are built
Each page is written to answer one question that people are demonstrably asking, and it is numbered as a sheet so you can see where it sits in the set. Figures are given as ranges where they genuinely vary, with the reason they vary. Where something is not reliably knowable, the page says what is knowable and stops there.
Corrections
Practice changes, funders restructure, and planning policy is revised. Anything on this site that concerns a current programme, a current threshold or a current deadline should be checked against the body that runs it before it is relied on.