MA Week 23 - Creative Practitioner visits

Creative practitioner visits – 15^th April 2016

 Visits from two established creative practitioners today, Luke Stephenson and Karen Stansfield. Unfortunately I missed Luke’s presentation due to other circumstances, but found plenty of interest in Karen’s talk. 

Karen had originally trained as a printmaker in textile design. However, throughout her career she has undertaken different roles and was keen to point out that you should take something from all your experiences and to bring together past learning, your other experience and current learning. She worked as a machinist whilst raising her children and then decided to return to learning in the form of a full-time degree in theatre. From this and her machinist experience she forged a career as a costumier. She is now a studio holder at West Yorkshire Print Workshop.  

Karen described herself as an “emotive mark maker” and she shared a couple of life experiences which had affected her deeply.  She lost a friend and decided to undertake work based on his work, using etching plates. She also used mark making to deal with an obstacle in her life, making marks on paper against an object, helping her to work round the problem, not knowing how things would turn out on the paper. She showed us the marks and they became almost organic and floral as she worked through the problem. I could really identify with this and talked to her afterwards about using creative visual practice to help heal yourself. It is not art therapy as such, but it is “therapising” yourself. 

She also talked about giving yourself “permission” to do things; she had done a course with one of the other studio holders at the workshop, experimenting, playing. My own thoughts on the “permission” issue are that sometimes you need to go through bad experiences to allow yourself to do things – courses, use your favourite notebook, buy some new paints – and again I could understand what Karen was talking about.  I also liked the fact that she was keen on using all your experience. I’m very aware that my past business experience is really useful in helping me to organise my time and express myself. Finally, I was heartened by the fact that Karen had not been afraid to move on and to learn new creative skills. She didn’t restrict herself in this area and I will take that as an example. 

After lunch Karen and Luke did a Q&A session for us. Some interesting points:

• Do personal work alongside paid work to keep yourself fresh
• Do blogs, follow blogs, put films on your blogs
• What are your specialities/unique selling points?
• Use all the strings to your bow.
• Do you want to develop a style/brand image?
• Don’t be afraid to take an unpaid opportunity if it gives you experience you need.