Finding your people
why community is everything - even when you're by yourself
I run two businesses - my own art practice, and a community interest company (in partnership). For decades, I did my my own work in my own way and while I had relationships with customers, many of whom I now consider among my closest friends, and of course many fabulous artist mates, it has mostly been a life spent in isolation. Now, that generally suits me down to the ground - while I love some individuals dearly I can’t be doing with people generally, as anyone who’s spent more than a few hours with me will tell you. So why am I writing to you about community?
This video was created for Story Bocs, the latest project myself and fellow creatives Sean Walter and Tina Mammoser are collaborating on for Tales in Sombre Tones, the CIC I mentioned earlier. I’ll get more into the how and why we got here in later posts about the biz side of things, but today I wanted to talk about how the most recent phase of this one really brought home how important our connections are. Because we’re a new company, our first challenge after having thought up something ridiculous we absolutely Must do, is how to pay for it. We don’t have regular income yet because we’re not that well known and so when a pot of local authority funding became available, I pounced on it to fund some of our r&d phase.
Story Bocs will, eventually, become a touring ‘library’ featuring a series of book shaped boxes with Things inside - a multi sensory exhibition, as part of which we want to have a community shelf. These boxes, made by the community, will tell the stories of individuals and organisations as a way of connecting people across the UK and encouraging further participation. The more the merrier :) To kick things off, we saw the local funding as an ideal way to do a trial run, giving us the chance to gather evidence of the need for this kind of work and get some feedback so we could work out any kinks before we went national and made massive tits of ourselves. Just as well really as things did not go according to plan…
So what happened? The short version is that we had planned to do a series of workshops building up to a pop-up show, geared towards any budding artists in the area who might like to gain a bit of experience and some exposure later when the work joined the wider programme. The snag was that we could only do the work on a handful of specific streets and with a very tight deadline. Still all perfectly do-able, we’d been preparing for months but then real life struck. For various reasons, all perfectly sound, as soon as we could actually start spending the money, the venues we thought we’d be working with had to start bowing out.
I’ve had enough happen in my half century or so (quite a lot of it recently) to know how little it takes for plans to change when you’re an indie business so again, absolutely no fault of anyone’s but it did leave us in a real pickle. I’ve only been in this area for less than two years and most of that has been spent head down working away, so I didn’t have established working relationships with spaces and finding suitable replacements took a lot of digging. By the time we’d got most of the sessions booked back in it was time to start, so my carefully curated press list and promotion plan was neither use or ornament. We’d missed deadlines for newsletters, interviews and worst of all, because I’d waited to go to community centres until we had something bookable, absolutely nobody in the vicinity had any idea who I was or what I was on about.
Had I been doing this in Whitby where I lived for 8 years, even though I was an unsociable git there as well, I could have wandered up to my local pub, announced free cake and been booked up before someone could say ‘get the kettle on’. Now, in case this is all starting to sound very tragic, a lot of wonderful things did come out of our test run. Thanks to contacting pretty much every business in NE6, now people know who we are and we’ve forged some great partnerships with people we absolutely can’t wait to team up with again. I drank a lot of coffee, ate a lot of said cake and had a great time quietly creating with the folks who did find out about it, which gave me time to talk -and listen- in a way busier sessions wouldn’t have.
Best of all, we now have a network of community groups far and near, organisations and artists who are all going to be part of our next round - so for the company, it’s been very worthwhile. Even if we didn’t actually achieve, well, any of what our intended outputs were - we have some gloriously unexpected input instead. It has been a very valuable lesson though in how we need to be developing local connections for future events if we’re going to succeed with our national and international plans. Everyone you deal with is part of another community and it’s only when we get together, be that in person or online, that we can really make things happen. I’m really excited about the next chapter - if you or someone you know would like to get involved, please do get in touch either with me direct or via our website.