Maria Percival: Arts Council England
Open Eye Gallery was delighted to welcome Maria Percival (Relationship Manager, North, Arts Council England) to speak during the launch of Collected Possibilities and Pieces of Us.
Collected Possibilities presents a curated exhibition showcasing work from final year students of Hugh Baird University Centre. This exhibition comes out of an ongoing collaboration with the BA (Hons) Digital Imaging and Photography course, whereby dialogue between Open Eye Gallery and the students has provided critical feedback and suggested creative context on these final major projects.
Throughout our recent Open 2: Pieces of You exhibition, four emerging artists provided a series of workshops to four schools across the Wirral and Liverpool. The workshops were supported by the Curious Minds organisation and it’s Specialist Leaders in Cultural Education (SLiCE) programme. We have produced a video which captures the essence of the programme and the young people’s experiences of the workshops, titled Pieces of Us, which is displayed on our new Digital Window Gallery.
Maria Percival: Opening speech
Arts Council England’s role is to champion, develop and invest in arts and culture in England. Our Mission is ‘Great art and culture for everyone’. We support the arts, museums and libraries – from theatre to digital art, reading to dance, music to literature, and crafts to collections. But we’re about much more than just funding. We have a development role, which means we give advice and promote partnership. And through this we hope to develop a thriving arts ecology that offers everybody the chance to enjoy, participate and create. Our mission can be distilled into two core goals: we want excellent arts and culture to thrive, and we want as many people as possible to engage with it. Children and young people are at the heart of what we do. We want to help release their talent, to give them the chance to work with the best professional artists – and to show them routes to work in one of the wide range of careers in the creative industries, if they wish. Above all, we want the arts to enrich their lives – whether as artists, or as audiences. And we believe that there should be no barriers to talent.
And this goes further – Arts Council England’s promise is to support people to enjoy a learning continuum in arts and culture and high quality life experiences from early years to entering the world of work and beyond. To this end we deliver, or support others to deliver, a range of national schemes for children and young people, including Bridge organisations – we invest £10 million a year in 10 Bridge organisations who play a vital role in building local cultural alliances, increasing provision for children and young people, and who collectively now work with more than 7000 schools. We also engage with other development activity which overlaps and complements this, for instance our talent development work and which focuses on supporting artists at all career stages. And also on developing centres of regional excellence outside of London where talent can thrive.
Building partnerships between FE/HE and arts and cultural organisations offer perhaps the most useful place to develop formal and informal pathways for learning. Recognising this ACE has committed through its corporate plan to build effective partnerships with further and higher education institutions to ensure that artistic talent and workforce diversity is being developed and nurtured and to encourage more FE/HEs to work closely with arts and cultural organisations to support the arts and culture ecology in their localities.
And there are strong contextual reasons for this, the down-grading of the arts throughout the education system, the threat to practice based courses from: the introduction of tuition fees, also opportunities such as the education sector’s adoption of public engagement strategies and the cultural shift implied within the HEI Research Excellence Framework which emphasises impact of research beyond the academic sphere.
In the North there is and has been for a while a very strong and distinctive approach. The number and strength of these partnerships here has led to the development, with Arts Council support of, Culture Forum North – an open network of alliances between Higher Education and the Arts across the North and which acts as a platform through which this work can be championed, shared and developed to enable impact beyond individual partnerships – regionally and nationally.
Through 2016 Forum partners are working together on three key agendas: Research, civic, talent. All of which chime with Arts Council’s strategic priorities. And for the partners provide a key opportunity to look at what the civic role of each is in a city and how they can create an increased civic impact by working together.
As Juan Cruz (former Director of Liverpool School of Art and Design, LJMU) has said:
‘[So] we recognise in the university and in arts organisations that our success is intimately tied to the success of the city, and that we all effectively play for the city, delivering high quality art experience and education that also contributes to the cities’ broader aims and agendas.’
Specific examples of exemplary partnerships in the North, include:
- LJMU’s model of embedded lecturer posts based in arts organisations, at Tate Liverpool, Liverpool Biennial and FACT
- Northumbria University’s embedded staff and programme development with the Baltic in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in particular with the Baltic 39 space and which includes artist studios
- The University of Bolton’s new BA (Hons) Theatre co-designed and delivered with the Octagon Theatre Bolton, one of the UK’s most successful regional producing theatres
- Manchester Metropolitan University’s launch pad programme with Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, which offers artist support and showcasing at the emerging end of artistic practice and, like Collected Possibilities, offers a public platform for MMU’s annual degree show
The characteristics of these partnerships nationally can be broadly identified as being designed to: maximise current and develop new resources; add value; further shared aspirations; meet individual corporate performance targets or objectives; raise profile; realise new opportunities. A recurring theme nationally, in terms of what unlocks this potential, is that leadership at the top – CEO or Vice Chancellor level – significantly aides the sustainability, investment in and prioritisation of partnership work. Leading to outcomes such as: greater resilience; stronger programmes; work ready graduates; more student applications; higher profile appointments; more valuable assets; learning organisations; place making; extended audiences; and greater national and international profile. All of which chime with increasing emphasis within the recent H.E. White Paper on: the quality of the student experience, which includes relationships with industry in designing, developing and delivering courses; and developing work ready students. Very few (if any) of these partnerships are with HE-delivered-within F.E. institutions, such as this one with Hugh Baird University Centre. And this example is compelling in what it can teach us and offer in terms of extending the possibilities to support talent across a greater range of demographics and lifelong learning. With the greater flexibility in terms of living costs associated with undertaking degrees in this context, there is great opportunity to support diversity within artistic excellence and the next generation of artists. As well as opportunities to retain local talent and which is a key element of Arts Council’s talent development agenda.
As with all the partnerships we see, there is a strong and complementary fit between Open Eye and Hugh Baird – the shared photography focus but also Open Eye’s experience as an artist support agency and learning organisation offering vocational and professional experiences to a range of artists, professional and amateur, since launching in 1977. Collected Possibilities and Pieces of Us demonstrate two sides of the talent development challenge. Collected Possibilities presents us with the next generation of photographers, or arts workers potentially, before they emerge either as creative practitioners, into the world of work or further study. Pieces of Us shows us artists a step on, perhaps gaining their first paid professional experience as an artist, in turn inspiring a younger generation working alongside them. The opportunity to apply their skills to the real world and earn income is an invaluable demonstration of the next challenges ahead: how to navigate earning a living as an artist. And which is where the arts Council also seeks to invest and to work in partnership to enable more artists from a greater diversity of backgrounds to make a viable living as an artist, in a locale that can support artists careers through all stages of their development. And which again requires national schemes and structures, delivered via a place-based approach, but that’s another story …
Congratulations to the partnership and very importantly to the artists whose talent is clearly evident.