1. What was your inspiration for cofounding 64 Million Artists?
I was really stuck at work - I’d worked in the cultural sector for 10 years but had become so focused on strategy and planning and getting things ‘right’ that I’d stopped taking risks and being creative. I took a month off work and got different people to set me different creative challenges to do every day. It totally opened my eyes to how easy it is to lose our creativity, and how simple it is to re-find it. I became passionate about helping others do the same and now we work across all sorts of different spaces and places doing just that.
2. How do you hope that 64 Million Artists will develop in the future?
We’re moving into looking at how creativity can affect different sectors - how can the cultural sector become more creative? How can health become more creative? How can Ageing become more creative? This feels really exciting but we’re also keeping a core focus on individuals and groups and how we can support them to develop. I’d love to see us (and others) help shift the focus in this country from ‘art and creativity is what artists do’ to ‘arts and creativity are what everyone does.’ I’m interested in how using our creativity helps us to develop a sense of agency, and sharing it helps us be more vulnerable and take risks, leading to better relationships.
3. What has been your favourite challenge so far and why?
Earlier this year, we ran our annual January Challenge and this year was the highest year of participants, which was just a wonderful way to start 2017. We set most of the tasks but we also had seven partners who set challenges to give a different approach and different challenge to our participants. On Day 5, an artist called Inua Ellams set a task called The Golden Conversation. He asked you to go to the 5th text message in your inbox and write the message vertically down the page. These words then formed the end words of a poem, and your task was to write a poem based on these words. The response from that challenge was amazing, and it was partly the level of engagement we got, but also it really opened my eyes as to how something as every day, and often purpose-led as a text message can evoke such creativity. Texts such as ‘What do you want for dinner?’ or ‘I’ll be home late, sorry’ inspired poems about love, loss, gratitude, memory - the collection and variation actually was quite astounding and it felt like people were really invested in the work they were doing. The January Challenge, is all about accessing your own creativity but it is also about inspiring and encouraging others, and this challenge did exactly that - it was great.
4. What artists or artworks inspire you?
I am really interested in artists that work on a mass scale and work in collaboration with others. I loved Jeremy Deller’s recent piece 'We are here because we are here’ and the way it sprung up on people and engaged them in their everyday. On the whole, you’re much more likely to find me at a Fun Palace than a gallery, but one of my favourite challenges I did when I took that time off work was to sit in the Rothko room at Tate for 2 hours! I read that Rothko made those pieces specifically to get people to slow down and contemplate and I loved that. It was such a great 2 hours!
5. What do you think is the most difficult part of being creative is?
I think quite often it’s time - we tell ourselves we don’t have time to be creative because we’re too busy or we’ve got too much on. I’d argue that creativity is constantly feeding into our lives without us always knowing it - whether that’s singing along to the radio in the morning or trying out a new recipe or doodling mid phone call, or making up excuses and coming up with ideas - these are examples of people being creative - of spending time being creative without necessarily acknowledging it. Creativity and day-to-day living actually go hand in hand.
Then I think there’s - I think with creativity we often worry about not doing it right, or you know, that drawings not good enough, or that piece of writing isn’t ‘perfect’ but actually, I don’t think creativity is about that. It’s about just giving it a go - it's giving yourself the time and space to express yourself without worrying about being right. Creativity is about the way we see the world, and right now we all need help in trying to reimagine the world a bit!
6. What advice do you have for young, emerging artists?
In life, there will inevitably be things that we won’t enjoy doing - don’t make art, which is something which is so personal and expressive, something that you don’t enjoy.. keep remembering that you choose it.
Also, don’t put too much pressure on yourself. I find if I put too much pressure on ideas, they don’t come. And then they’ll come when I’m in the shower, or on my way somewhere and I’ll have a mad panic moment trying to find a pen or a piece of paper (receipts quite often) so that I can scribble the idea down, and then it’s there, it physically exists outside of my mind, and then I can decide what to do with it. Finally, focus on the every day - if you feel stuck or need inspiration, look at the items on your bedside table, or the sauce bottles on the dinner table, your own face when you smile - focus on these little things and you’ll be amazed at where they may take you.
