The following interview took place between Katy Morrison (Director, PINK), and Rebekah Beasley and Mollie Balshaw (Directors, Short Supply), in relation to the Short Supply project MADE IT 2022 presented at HOME, and across Manchester city centre in collaboration with Jack Arts. MADE IT provides one of the first opportunities for graduating artists to exhibit their work, expand their network and begin their creative careers after leaving education.
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KM: Whilst researching for this interview, I found myself re-listening to an interview you did with David McLeavy for Young Artists in Conversation (YAC) back in 2020. It was wonderful to hear you lay out your vision and plans for the future, including MADE IT, and then to see you realise that with the work you’ve done over the last 3 years, there’s been a lot going on!
From the success of MADE IT, to hosting a number of collaborative projects and more recently travelling across the North West of England to explore the various things happening in different towns and cities, how’s that all going?
RB: It’s been really productive researching with other people and places; taking time to go and meet others. It’s the first time we’ve actively gone to the different regions in the North West and it’s been interesting hearing from those regions – going directly to them and asking: what’s missing here? What are you looking for? We met a group of uni students from Cumbria, and all of them expressed how they were thinking of moving back out of Cumbria as there was nothing in Carlisle. We wanted to know why there isn’t anything there that retains young artists, and what they would want in Carlisle that would make them stay. There’s a lot of things happening within the various boroughs of Cumbria but a lack of communication between those places (probably because they’ve got all those hills in the way). We’ve also been to Lancashire and Merseyside so far and had similar conversations.
MB: Travel itself, you don’t necessarily consider it initially – but being able and inclined to travel to different places is a real barrier in our world. It’s quite challenging going to places that are really underserved and feeling the responsibility to contribute to the change that locals want to see, but it’s a process. We have to know what’s going on to know how to address it. This is something that I wish organisations with more money and resources were doing. We want to start a chain reaction and get people interested in cross-regional dialogues – imagine how much better things would be if everyone talked and connected beyond their immediate location.
KM: I think that’s been a long-standing problem. It’s massively a problem for places that require a train ride, but I also see it creep in a lot within Manchester and its surrounding areas. There’s no conversation and I see communication as a significant support structure. When you talk you have the opportunity to understand what people might need.
RB: For us living in Warrington, we are smack bang between Manchester and Liverpool and there is noticeably zero conversation between the two of them. It baffles us. The art scene in Liverpool and Merseyside is so different to the way it is in Greater Manchester, but similar in ways that there’s the issues with communication, gaps between the artist-led and institutions, etc. – but it’s just a different feel really. There’s a number of institutions local to Warrington that show interest, especially in artist-led activity and the desire to platform young, emerging people and projects more, but whilst the interest is there, the conversation or communication isn’t strong enough to give us confidence in being able to access other cities or organisations outside of our immediate circles.
KM: So let’s talk about MADE IT – I’m fascinated by the ways in which curatorial projects can be a disruptive force, and MADE IT for me very much feels like it’s holding open that space.
Since you started MADE IT, it’s been hosted in a number of artist-led spaces across the city, as well as online during the pandemic. Spaces that are often seen as supportive and accessible to graduates and emerging artists. Institutions in this and other cities, like you say, don’t necessarily feel as accessible, or they don’t outwardly communicate the ways in which we can access them. So my next question is how did you get a group of graduates into HOME?
RB: When we were first looking at putting MADE IT on back in 2019, back when we were cheeky little gob-shite students dropping everybody emails to a lot of different galleries to say ‘hey, we are thinking of putting on a big graduate showcase when we leave, kind of like a big degree show across the North West’ – and one of the people we emailed was Bren O’Callaghan, the previous Curator at HOME. Unusually, he actually replied. He told us that the gallery is booked up to 4-years in advance so it required much more forward planning than we were ready for at that time, but he was interested in the project and helped us select artists for MADE IT in 2019 instead. We maintained a relationship with Bren and the great staff team at HOME from there, particularly working on the Manchester Open with them.
MB: It’s just building up those connections slowly isn’t it. You work on your professional and creative relationship as you would do with any kind of relationship. You just build friendships with people. Then eventually HOME approached us and asked us what kind of project we’d like to bring to that space. Obviously, we knew we wanted to bring MADE IT, it’s our big project for the year and we wanted to bring graduates to that space and build those bridges for them. But we didn’t want to do it in a way that meant only 3 or 4 people got a commission – it didn’t feel very Short Supply. So we questioned how we could do it so that everyone could be involved.
KM: What are some of the ways in which you work with the artists that exhibit in MADE IT after the exhibition has ended? Do you work with the artists in different ways, or use these creative connections to build your creative programme?
MB: All the time! The benefit of doing this project for us is having a directory of names so that when things come up in the future we can pair artists, practices and projects together. We took 5 MADE IT artists to the Manchester Contemporary last November. It was really fun to place them in that space and be like here you go, you can be in this for free and see how it feels, and even if it’s not relevant, at least you’ve tried it and you can take it from there.
A lot of what we’ve done with our recent travels is going back to visit artists from the shows that we’ve done – to say you’ve come to us, so we’ll come to you now, chat to you and have a look in your studio. When we went to Lancashire we met with one of the artists from the very first MADE IT show and we had a nice catch up, asking what they’ve been up to since and how we might fit in with where they are now.
We now have a list of hundreds of artists who we can push forward and loop into things, and invite to future projects.
KM: There’s been 4 iterations of MADE IT since its launch in 2019. What’s next for it? Do you see it operating in the same way or will it change as you move away from your experience as graduates?
RB: MADE IT will be travelling to Rogue Artists’ Studios after its stint at HOME, this time made up of 25 artists that will be selected by ourselves, Mariama Attah (Curator, Open Eye Gallery) and Gabi & Zarina of The White Pube – crucially, this time we’ll be paying the artists. This is a big step for us, and as we continue to deliver the project we hope to keep upping the quality and scope.
MB: Even though we only graduated in 2019 and will soon be celebrating MADE IT’s 5th year, we recognise that things have still changed so much since then. The events of 2020 and its impact on graduates brought a lot of the problems students face within institutions to the surface. As we move further away from being graduates, we aren’t as in touch with what their needs are or what that support should look like. We want to make sure that there’s still a fresh perspective in there from someone who is a recent graduate, who can say what it is that they want now – that’s what we did when we started the project, and that’s the legacy we want to maintain.
KM: How might MADE IT grow in a way that continues to avoid competition?
MB: It’s about cultivating a community spirit. Encouraging members of communities to see each other. It’s less about them connecting with Short Supply as a name, but rather about them acknowledging those fellow artists. We know as a small organisation we cannot give the same level of attention and appropriate knowledge to a group of 200+ people, but those artists can all acknowledge each other. If you get people in a room together to chat and say the things that they want, guaranteed there will be someone else in that room who can help them and vice versa, and that’s what it’s about. There’s no competition when the goal is to get them to collaborate, see themselves as professionals and work horizontally.
KM: And finally have you noticed any difference in levels of support offered to emerging artists over the last couple of years, especially in light of the pandemic?
MB: I think we still have a long way to go. I see a lot of opportunities that fall short, particularly with regards to artist fees and care. Even many large institutions that by all logic should have the proper systems in place to support artists to deliver projects safely and be paid fairly for them just aren’t adapting fast enough. Commissions of a few hundred quid, that doesn’t even cover one day of what an artist should get. Artist-led organisations and institutions can do better than that. I worry that the cancellation of degree shows and the effects of the pandemic have made support for graduates a bit of a novelty, the thing organisations can do right now to seem relevant, caring and like they have their finger on the pulse. That might be a bit cynical of me, but putting graduates in shows isn’t enough. They need to be encouraged, taken seriously and not made to feel like they should be so bloody grateful for scraps. What is encouraging though, is to see the shift in perspective about degree shows from graduates themselves – a sentiment that resonates with us, if the institution and art world on the outside aren’t willing to support you then sod ‘em, do your own thing, self-organise and it will probably be more honest, useful and interesting anyway.
What we wanted to do with MADE IT at HOME was to kick that protest up a notch, to push it a bit more and to not beat around the bush. If you don’t make space for these people to exist, they’re going to find each other, and then the walls of the old art world will crumble, so it’s in the best interest of institutions to acknowledge that there’s no art world without artists. We’re taught that we are all individuals and that we are fighting for the same thing, and get fed the scarcity narrative that there’s not enough jobs or opportunities – but it’s not true. There’s enough for everyone if we look around at each other – and I guess that’s what it’s always been about.
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MADE IT 2022 is at HOME until 24 July 2022. More information can be found here.
Katy Morrison is a curator/researcher based in Manchester.
This interview is supported by HOME.
Published 20.07.2022 by James Schofield in Interviews
2,136 words