As we sped coughing and spluttering into our opening we were met with enthusiasm and a great deal of buzz.
We already have people wanting to come back and bring art. I can’t wait to carry on developing this!
Loving it.
Live art
Live music.
Wall art.
Space for young people to showcase and get involved.
Next week – marketing week. If anyone can help us to get flyers out and media interest then please please get in contact.
Last week, we had a session on ‘Making it Work: self employment in the arts’ with Juliet Brain, and it really I feel saw me turn a corner, and crystalised how much we have done and the potential of what we could do, both as individual artists and as a team. The beauty of the day was it was a real warts and all session about what life as a freelancer is like, from someone who has all the experience we could have wished for; and we were all made to really look at ourselves in terms of strengths and weaknesses, which is never an easy thing to do.. but it was amazing by the end how much it made me think and the confidence it inspired. We looked t what we already knew about ourselves – I knew my basic confidence lay in my ability as an artists and as an organiser, and my driving passion was equal for creating art and for providing other people with platforms and opportunities for their work as well as bringing this creativity for the public; but Juliet also asked us to write all our qualifications and experience on post it notes and stick them on the wall – the rainbow splurge that emerged made us realise that together we have a lot to offer! After a confidence boost, we explored the slightly more daunting side of arts as buissness – ie branding and copy write issues (arrrgh!), issues around child protection and partnership working (arrrrrrgh!) and tax (arrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh!), which made our brains hurt but I think really instilled in us a determination that we could and would get on top of these things and get them right in the future, backed up by all the skills that we realised we had in our tool box which really had been enhanced and added to by all we have done with the Young Leaders Programme so far. We also looked at the links that are out there for artists, big organisations like the Society of British Designers and the English National Youth Arts Network, and descovered all the advice and support they can give which took some of the mystery out of such massive networks and turned them instead into useful tools to navigate. I think overall this was the key note of today, it really was so much about empowering us to take on board all of what we could utilise to help us get where we want to go, and recognise what we have already to back us up!
Talking of putting our skills to work, on Friday we went to go and see the first space in which the YAK SHACK will be opening, as part of the Fusion project i Cowley based in an empty shop in the Temple Cowley shoping centre in Oxford. It is not going to be empty any more! We are going to be upstairs for the last three Saturdays in June, and each of us are going to be doing music, visual art, poetry and graffiti based things involving and including young local artists and showing people what we are about! More details to follow, but I am so excited; planning is all well and good and obviously necessary but there is NOTHING like actually getting active, creative and stuck in! ….
Our first day of training after the HFL filming project – we were a three man band today with me, James and Becca, but by golly we got a lot done! Being in the first stages of thinking about our own projects ( : ) ) we had a look at a recent project and had a bit of a brain storming session about how we might go about organising our own and what our objectives might be for making sure young people that participated got the most out of it. The project itself was a very interesting idea – a short film for the arts council about what art means to young people who are NEET (not in education, employment or training); the conclusion being not very interested to begin with, but only because they hadn’t been given the opprtunity to discover all the things art could actually emcompass (theatre, music, poetry, graffiti, dance etc) and how they could therefore take ownership of it. It really made me think about what I want to do with my project, and how passionate I feel about breaking down the barriers of exclusivity in the arts for young people.
We also had a chat with Catherine Lacey, an amazing person that has done many things and is now Cheif Exec of the Oxfordshire Children’s and Voluntary Youth Services; it was really great to meet someone with that much experience who was impassioned about what we wanted to do! You can’t get a confidence boost much better, really.
Today was the first time I have watched our vlogs from the HFL project; apart from confirming the fact that on camera I look like the moon from the Mighty Boosh, I think they really show how well we are all going to work together, and bring a massive dose of GSOH to whatever we do as well as determination to do something preety damn good. We were also introduced courtesy of Liz to the wonderful world of twitter – and before all anti- twitterites judge, James and I tweeted that we as two young artsits were looking for an exhibition space around Oxford and within half an hour had heard about this amazing sounding exhibition wall at Didcot’s new arts centre The Cornerstone! So literally watch this space…..
Posted in Ellie Tranter
Tagged dance, exhibition, graffiti, music, poetry, theatre, training
