Somerset House
London’s home for cultural innovators
To start off, tell us a bit about your background and how you came to work at Somerset House.
Going back to the very beginning, I didn’t know that creativity could be an option for me - I’d never been to a theatre, never been to a concert hall, didn’t practise music and drama wasn’t available as a GCSE option. The whole world of creativity was hidden from me but then I stumbled across a Community Arts Project in the town that I lived in. I took part and it changed my life. I was from a low socio-economic background with no access to the creative industries and the transformation I went through by taking part in this community youth programme was an inspiration. So I saw first hand how art can be used as a tool for social transformation.
It made me wonder what else is possible, so I sort of followed my nose and took up education and projects that I found inspiring - I was really interested in the ethics around engaging with community and people. At uni I picked up an important philosophy through Paulo Freire’s book ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ which is that raising the consciousness for oppressed peoples is the route to liberation. To me, creative practice is a tool for liberation, and that’s been my guiding principle as I’ve built my career.
Now I’m the Head of Inclusive Talent Engagement at Somerset House, I’ve got a real opportunity to shape what the strategy is here. I want to move away from traditional learning and participation programmes and think about how young people can be part of the critical dialogue around what’s happening in the world today. Rather than them just receiving information through the news or social media, it’s about how they can interrogate and question some of the systems that they’re inheriting so that they can build a cognitive ability to be in critical dialogue with some of those systems in order to create new and better pathways for themselves.
Talk us through your Talent Pathways and Upgrade Yourself series. Who are they for? What are the aims and how can young people get involved?
Upgrade Yourself is the umbrella term that we use to describe a suite of different programmes. We have one-off programmes and we also have durational programmes. Anyone can join the one-off programmes and within that we have a creative careers festival which happens once a year, a two-day festival (which is coming up on 7th & 8th August!), and three exhibition takeovers where young people can get access to the exhibitions for free with a suite of workshop sessions designed around the themes of each particular exhibition.
We also have monthly sessions which happen on the first Wednesday of every month which is a deep dive into a particular practice. We bring in practitioners, experts, creative businesses, entrepreneurs to talk about their work and then those young people get tickets to sort of a public program as well.
Then we have longer-term projects where we'll work with young people over six months or a year. The six-month programme is called the Future Artists Programme. We work with 25 young people. It's an application process. It starts in February and ends in August. The next cycle will be starting in October and will end in February next year. We work with the studio artists here at Somerset House as a source of inspiration to guide young people in developing their creative process, finding their artistic voice and nurturing their unique artistic practice, whatever that may be.
Then we have a year-long opportunity called Creative Industry Placements. We work with five young people over the course of the year. They get placed in two six-month placements across Somerset House and we pay them the London Living Wage. We've got lots of resident organizations who are based here. So the placementee might be based, for example, in the exhibitions team for the first six months and then be based in the Booker Prize team for the second six months, so that they get a real variety of what it feels like to work in a creative organisation for the first time.
We’re also in the process of introducing a new community strand where we’ll take creatives and makers based at Somerset House out into a community setting to meet young people where they are. We can’t always expect young people to be able to come here so we want to be able to go out and meet them in the spaces they’re already engaging with. And we’re launching a new bursaries and grants initiative which will support young people to develop their practise and give them access to a co-working space at Somerset House.
I think we should be creating an alternative provision. School systems aren't serving young people. It's broken. The perpetual attainment of grades to ‘reach the next level’ doesn't prepare young people for the real world. That's what the cultural institutions should be leveraging. So actually, how can we create real-world scenarios so that young people can experience what the real world actually is like and show them the different pathways that they can take? I think we need to be showing alternative pathways into the creative industries as the pathways that we see in traditional education settings are quite linear. They say you get to ‘this’ level, then you do ‘this’, then you become a music manager or an artist. But I don’t think that is a very realistic pathway, particularly for underrepresented groups who don’t have social and cultural capital.
The reality is that creative paths are often meandering. Part of our job as a cultural institution which is home to so many different creatives, is to show those different pathways. For example, you might need to do a side job, you might need to do a piece of work that you don't want to do in order to have the resources to make the thing that you really want to make. In the social-media realm you see these people who have ‘made it’ and they make it look so simple and I think that’s really damaging. Part of cultural institutions’ jobs is to show the messy nature of it, the gritty nature of it and real-world-people living in this way right now, so that young people can become comfortable with the idea of a non-linear career path. Creatives are also usually much more inter-disciplinary than we think, which is important to stress to young people - you don’t have to just be a violinist. You might also be a really good planner, so you could apply that in production management. Or you also really like drawing and so want to have this as a practice as well. You can have many different assets that you could draw on to build a varied career.
What kind of differences do you notice in the young people you work with for sustained periods? What kinds of changes do they go through?
I think the biggest impact that I can talk about comes from the creative industry placements because we're with them for a year. We often see them go from being quite underconfident, quite shy, not sure what the rules of engagement are within the professional world to securing full-time jobs within the creative industries. We see young people go through a real journey of understanding who they are, how to operate in an institution or an organisation, how to have conversations, how to disagree, and build their sense of confidence.
Our Future Artist Programme used to be run every half-term for five days and then we’d never see those young people again. One of the first things I did when I came into post was to change that programme to six months because I don't think we can make a difference in young people's lives if we only see them once. We need to be able to have multiple touch points or multiple opportunities for them to engage with us so that we can really start to see a shift or change in their decision-making or their confidence or their pathway. Now we see those young people develop their creative voice, understand who they are as an artist, what they want to say in the world, which mediums and styles and forms they want to play with, which artists they're more drawn to, which parts of the industry or the sector, the wider cultural landscape that speaks to them. We see them build a deeper awareness of who they are and what skills they have.
I think in traditional art forms it hasn't changed. By traditional art forms I mean ballet, opera, classical music. But change has come from within other sectors and multi-disciplinary mediums. Somerset House has a real mission around social and creative innovation. And so, the creatives that are based here will be entrepreneurs. They'll be inventors and they're creating new prototypes, new things, new ways of working and seeing and being in the world. And I think that that's very exciting for the world that we live in. We see innovation across different mediums here - performance art mixed with science and data, and people mixing traditional art forms with contemporary ones.
I guess the real long-term question is around sustainability and impact. It's great to bring people in and show them what's possible, but we all know that sustainable practice in the creative industries, financially, is quite precarious. We need to be thinking about what we’re doing to support underrepresented folk to financially be able to sustain a long-term career. That’s currently where I’m thinking about how best we can make change.
I've got so many but I think you're only as strong as the team that you build and that you have to practice what you preach. So I have these values and principles about raising critical consciousness and developing agency within my team. One of my proudest moments is getting to speak to my team and be like ‘hey what do you think we should do and how should we do it? Let’s try it and test it and learn from it’. I think embedding a culture of testing and learning is a really good methodology to sort of bring in a spirit that we're all figuring this out together. If I didn't do that within the team then they wouldn't be equipped with the tools to make brilliant programmes.
Getting to launch projects that were just a speckle of an idea, like our monthly programme is also a proud moment. The feedback that I consistently saw from young people was that they want more regular in-person activity. Third spaces are gone. Where do they go? Young people feel that creative education institutions aren’t offering them the space to think liberally and laterally about what’s going on in the world, so we applied for a grant from the Linbury Trust to do our monthly programme and we got it. Them recognising the importance and seeing the value in what we do made me feel really proud.
My biggest proudest moment is seeing young people come through and become the fabric of this place. You see young people who are on placement or who are part of the Future Artist programme just doing their thing and you're like yes you're here. We're doing good!
Finally, what are you listening to at the moment?
I listen to so much music all of the time! I listen to NTS every day, but at the moment I’m really enjoying IZCO’s new album ‘Powerscroft’ and I’ve got tickets to see The Tara Clerkin Trio in October.