Project blog

I’m a creative professional of a certain age. What that means in practice is probably as obscure to me as it is to you. It’s certainly not a good place to start a job search, or a funding application— which frankly, is what being a creative professional largely involves. Being of a certain age, I’ve done enough of them now to set my watch by the phases of the application moon: late nights trying to figure out what on earth, why on earth, how on earth you are ever going to justify the patronage of the latest funding body to throw you a bone, before frantically trying to convert your latest creative recipe into an oven-ready proposal.

I’m in between places: professionally, creatively, domestically. Hopefully my moral, political, social selves are less dislocated, but frankly, it’s hard to tell some days. It’s tough to remember what you’re holding onto when you are reinventing, upskilling, refocusing, transitioning yourself with every attempt to make your practice pay. 

Who was I when I started all this? Who is the person still trying to make it stick? How closely am I related to these travelling salesmen? Do I even like what they sell?

Let’s try this again. I’m a creative professional of a certain age. I run a small film production company, have an solid academic background, and a set of life experiences that make for excellent pub conversation. I’m awash with ideas. I’m making rent— just, which in a city like Bristol, is a success story. The problem? I’m not any one of these things: I live in the gaps, spreading my mass between toeholds on a cultural cliff face. My sinews are straining with spreading myself so thin. Reaching any further seems downright inconsiderate; it would be a mighty inconvenience if I lost my grip.

I started loafing up to Producer Wednesdays like a stray dog; assured for one day a week at least of a desk and sense of things happening around the place. I’d coveted the studio for years; applying in the earliest days of my career when I took a punt on youthful enthusiasm and a local connection to usher me into Bristol’s leading creative incubator. The silence was deafening. Since then, work had taken me in other directions; the ideas and aspirations of that young man were largely consigned to the backs of desk draws in half a dozen tiny bedrooms around the world. But I’d made it work: the work became a business, and the business became my livelihood. It’s a good business— I’m proud of it. But it wasn’t until I came of a Certain Age that I started to realise that being the arbiter of your own creative sluice gate doesn’t give you the ability to make it rain. 

So when applying for residency at the studio was suggested, I paused. By this point, I was around often enough to be recognisable; I’d settled into a groove with the workspace, and found a rhythm with a new idea: building on commissions from a pair of universities, using my skills to transform research into impactful, story-led engagement tools. The initial collaboration had been a success, and for the first time in a while, I had a vision of a larger and deeper and richer venture. I didn’t quite know what it was yet. But what was clear is that I didn’t have all the tools to realise it. Yet. 

That was when I paused. Because being invited to apply for the studio would involve changing the dimensions of my practice. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that being a resident came with responsibilities: that my work needed to contribute to the principles and the ethos of the studio: to combine creativity, technology, and community in challenging, playful ways. 

Now, I knew I had those things. But I didn’t have them all in the palm of my hand— rather, I had a toehold here, a finger grip there, and my ease scaling the cliff-face of the creative community was a shade away from rigor mortis. In realising a creative profession, I’d almost forgotten how it felt to be creative. 

Joining the studio gave me the right to relax: to trust in the process. It gave me a space to explore, physically, intellectually and emotionally. 

At first, my project remained out of sight, but no longer out of mind. I learned to watch the dots form on the surface of my sclera; fuzzy, disconnected, unfocused. Research-grounded. Participant-led. True Stories, (un)Real Stories… Empathy machines. Storytelling as Self-Making: Narrative as Neural Pathfinding. This is something bigger than another client commission. This will be a long, involved, multifaceted venture. It will take many iterations, and several years to come to fruition. I will need partners, facilitators, mentors, staff. And I’ve reached a certain age, where I can perceive all this and stand ready for it.

I’m not an artist, per se. I’m too reflexive, metacritical, self-analytical to run freely over the artistic plains. But perhaps I’d just not given myself the space to be an artist. Perhaps I’d not given myself permission to run without a finish line.

The first step was absorption. Learning how to immerse myself in the community, aligning my antennae to receive as well as broadcast. I started conversations, went to presentations, read books, sent emails, made calls. Sometimes I didn’t know what I’m asking for— that in itself was refreshing. Conversations were conversations, not networking moves or elevator pitches. 

The next steps weren’t steps, exactly. It was more like falling; allowing yourself to follow gravity and impulse and instinct. I fell towards a place where my ideas were waiting for me. Ideas old and new, seeds in a seedbank, grains of soil from a dozen temporary homes and half-experienced lives that feed into the now I find myself in. They weren’t half-lived, stillborn ideas: they were nubs of new growth, waiting for freshly tilled earth.

I start to imagine myself not as a creative in search of a project- a noun in search of a verb- but a maker, immersed in, encompassed by the doing. Doing the work. Tilling the soil, making space for things to grow. I found myself in the gaps between the poles of my work, not trying to work out why I wasn’t one or the other, but why I’d found a home in those places in-between. Between research and art, knowledge and exploration, study and social practice. Making a virtue of occupying these liminal spaces, and building work out of these experiences.

And what was extraordinary was, as I began to tell the story of this unborn project, the project began to create itself. It gathered momentum, drawing interest and substance to itself; tufts of grass, steadily manifesting a field.

Then, the first signs of the project growing beyond the limits of a simple commission. I was invited to a pair of academic conferences, in Liverpool and Glasgow. one was tiny, tightly focused, focusing on the vogue in academia for harnessing creativity to take research beyond the ivory tower. The other, grander and more prestigious: an international conference in my collaborators’ field of expertise; I’d been invited to join a panel presenting our work to leading lights in the community. But there were costs attached. Significant costs, and unlike my partners, I didn’t have an institution paying my way. For years, I prided myself on carving out a creative career on my own dime. But as a creative professional of a certain age, opportunities to develop and grow are all too often out of reach.

So when the studio support fund presented itself, I was thrilled and unnerved by the prospect. Money doesn’t come without a price attached, and when you can’t see the price-tag, it’s best to assume you can’t afford it. I wrote off the opportunity; I was too new, too early in the work to justify the studio’s benevolence. They’d give me money? To pay for me to do something for me? You develop an allergy to anything that doesn’t have a direct value proposition attached. But I kept coming back to the studio. The project continued to grow. Ideas took root, and those roots bound the dusty loam from which they’d grown into something firm and fertile. Somewhere in that knit of rapidly expanding thoughts was something rich and nutritious: something like belief.

I applied for the money. Far too late, ignorant of the procedures and conventions, forcing a totally unreasonable deadline on the funding committee. Despite my appalling timing, they gave me the grant. With that simple yes I felt myself shift. 

The studio fund paid for my travel, conference accreditation and accommodation. Three bills that would have kept me outside of the conversation; ignorant of the dialogue within, the knowledge gained and shared, the gaps I knew intuitively how to fill. With those bills paid for in a moment, I was startled by the freedom I felt. To move freely from conversation to conversation. To listen, engage, or focus on myself; my reflections, my moments of connection. 

I filled pages of a new notebook, scribbling like an undergrad. Sketched ideas in my breaks, slung ideas and questions back and forth over pitchers of lukewarm caterer’s coffee. Found time for my business, as well as my creative work, and found pleasure in the whole spectrum of my practice. 

And at the end of it all, I had names. Links. References. And an invitation to another conference: this time to speak, share my work, and not only cover my costs covered, but be paid for my time. Travelling between places where things happen, where ideas are made and shared, joining the dots, making something new of those connections. I sat on the train home and juggled words. You’re not just a creative professional; you’re a professional creative. Somehow, the distinction matters. My creativity isn’t in service to a piece of work: my creativity is my work.

I’m still a creative professional of a certain age. But I’m no longer stuck in the gaps: I’m travelling to the places in between. It’s a journey with no fixed destination. But really, I’m here for the view.