Francesca Bethall-Collins Francesca is a self-employed local poet known as The Women of the Well and mother of two who has for a long time struggled to find space, time and resources to explore numerous business and artistic ideas.
Ambition: Francesca aimed to utilise her
first studio space to put the convergent business ideas and artistic ambitions she has been pursuing at home together “physically as well as in [her] head” and to produce work on this basis. Following on from a writing group which became disbanded but which gave her the discipline she needed, she had been performing poetry and writing a lot more, and she aimed to consolidate this activity. Of the space, Francesca said “I am confident it is the environment that will stimulate a surge of creative flow for me.”
Activities: Poetry, creative writing and business idea formulation.
Outcomes: Increased productivity,
clarity of artistic purpose and security in which to pursue that purpose, ability to meet other artists and share artistic experiences, increased output.
Quotes: Francesca benefited “greatly
from renting a more permanent writing and making studio in the future.” A poem written to summarise her experience of the Space CADets programme:
“How to lose oneself and find oneself at CADS... “...If one is to live and breath one’s art, or at least to experience life artificially, one needs space. This is not some sort
of elitist expectation. It is a practical solution to the challenge of creative enterprise. Artistic folk move in rhythms often at odds with conventional life in any society. Time and space can become chaotic. Artists: like everyone, can be prone to loosing themselves within the chaos. Or even finding themselves. I needed a place to find myself after chaotic interruptions; thereby allowing creativity to flow through me once again. CADS offered me a safe, yet stimulating space and time in which to gather myself. CADS provides an artistic home within and ‘without’. A ‘home within a home’. At CADS I have a work space and a thought space, and interaction with other resident artistic folk. Something unexpected was the lasting impact that having a separate space from other aspects of my life from which to receive visitors. Where else would I have serenaded and startled or lulled at night by the blended footsteps and voices, the harmonies of folk immersed in their own creative flow, and receiving their own visitors? There are many rooms, corridors, doors and buildings that are CADS, and many folk who have a sense of belonging to the collective enterprise. Where else would I have found such a family to which to belong? A family to which and whom to return.” Francesca Bethell-Collins – August 2016