Creative Colleagues - February 2025

FEBRUARY 2025

CREATIVE COLLEAGUES Creative Lives’ in-house magazine

HELP SPREAD THE WORD!

As you may have seen in our newsletter, social media, and in emails from Gareth, we’re currently collecting information about groups’ capacity, resilience, and connectedness, via our ‘Creative Lives Monitor’ survey.

In order to capture enough data, we need to hear back from as many groups as possible. All staff involved in micro-grant schemes across the UK and Ireland have been asked to email their contacts, and we’re also sending it to former Awards shortlisted groups.

Please help by spreading the word to any creative groups you’re in contact with. They could win a £250 / €300 grant! More info here: www.creative-lives.org/creative-livesmonitor-2025

THE QUICK CATCH-UP MEET OUR NEW ON AIR PRODUCER A big welcome to Arman Nouri, who joins us this month as our new Creative Lives On Air producer in London. Arman is an artist and educator with lots of experience across community arts, music, broadcasting and community development.

He’ll be looking out for creative groups in Barking and Dagenham, Brent, Croydon, Enfield and Newham, to create content for broadcast on BBC Radio London.

EDENDERRY SEED FUND RECIPIENTS ANNOUNCED After another successful round of seed funding, as part of our Creative Places: Edenderry project, we’ve awarded six €1,000 grants.

We can’t wait to see what multidisciplinary artist Helen Keenan, musician Angela Ward, ceramic artist Jenny Bergin, education coordinator Maura Kearny, early years sensory music artist Danna Davis Daly, and upcycler Ailish Moran do with their grants! Read all about them here.

NEED SOME CREATIVE LIVES POSTCARDS? Would you like some Creative Lives postcards to hand to people when you’re out and about?

We’ve just had a new batch printed, and Kelly has 300 of them looking for a good home.

Email kelly@creative-lives.org with your address and quantity required, and they’ll be posted to your door!

ROTHERHAM GRANT APPLICATIONS CLOSE The application window for our £250 micro-grants programme in Rotherham, run in conjunction with the Children’s Capital of Culture 2025, has now closed.

It was a tight deadline, but we received 33 applications. We will now assess the applications and look forward to seeing the projects come to fruition between now and June.

ON THE HORIZON BIPOC GUEST EXPLORES MOTIVATION This month’s Creative Network for BIPOC Creatives focusses on creative motivation. On 21 February, Phoenix will be joined by special guest Ica Headlam (pictured), founder of We Are Here Scotland, to share ideas and experiences.

In what’s sure to be a fascinating discussion, they’ll be exploring what motivates people to be creative - and how we can support and encourage others to be creative, too. Find out more here.

A CELEBRATION OF UPCYCLING Creative Lives is once again partnering with Heritage Crafts to host the next Creative Network: Crafts. This time, we’re also using the opportunity to launch the latest research report born out of our PhD internship, supported by the Scottish Graduate School of Arts & Humanities.

Intern Alana McPake will run the session on 5 March, joined by special guest Marianna Hamilton of R:evolve Recycle (pictured).

They’ll be exploring and celebrating how craft groups are the original re-users and upcyclers. Find out more here.

INTANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE IN THE SPOTLIGHT On 3 March, Creative Lives will be joined online by guests from DCMS, Heritage Crafts, Making Music, TRACS and others, to discuss the importance of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

The UK has joined the UNESCO Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage, and the UK Government is currently deciding which cultural traditions and practices to safeguard. We want to ensure that a wide range of participatory arts is reflected in the inventory.

You can read more about the meeting here.

REPORTS, TOOLKITS AND GUIDES! Over the next six weeks, we’ll be producing a range of reports, toolkits and guides, which we’d love to share far and wide. Coming up in March and April are: the Mapping Creative Health in Essex report (launching on 21 March); a ‘How to run a successful creative session’ toolkit; Alana’s research report, ‘Crafting Sustainable Communities’; a report covering our work in Reading; and an England version of our Cash for Culture guide.

GETTING TO KNOW...

ROBIN SIMPSON, CHIEF EXECUTIVE What’s your first memory of being creative?

Picking up an old ¾ size violin that my granny had found in the attic and I had decided I was going to play, and discovering that this was going to be much more difficult than it looked (and much louder than my parents had realised!).

If you could click your fingers and be proficient at any art/craft form, what would it be?

Tap dancing: rhythmic percussive dance is the coolest thing.

Which do you prefer: river walk, beachside stroll or hill climb?

Hill climb: you can’t beat a good view and a view needs some height. My favourite holidays have been lakes and mountains – the Scottish Highlands, the Tyrol in Austria, Bavaria in Germany, the Norwegian fjords.

You’re planning a day of live music and can book any 5 artists – who’s on the bill?

Dennis Brain (the legendary horn player), Kate Bush, Elvis Costello, Bellowhead, the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble. (That was an incredibly difficult question which I would answer completely differently tomorrow!).

What inanimate object in your home most sums you up? My French horn. My parents bought me my own instrument when I was 18 and had to give back the school horn I learned on, and it has been a major part of my life ever since.

What’s your favourite quality in a person? Politeness – an underrated virtue, increasingly out of fashion.

Which do you prefer – chocolate bar, slice of cake or biscuit?

I’m very partial to all three, but if I had to choose I could live on biscuits alone.

If you could choose any work of art to hang in your home, what would it be?

On the wall at home I have a charcoal picture of Loch Alsh, drawn by my grandfather on his honeymoon there in 1932, which I wouldn’t swap for anything.

Which country have you never visited but would love to? I’ve been very lucky: I don’t think there’s anywhere I really yearn to visit that I haven’t been.

Tell us one thing your colleagues would be surprised to learn about you Probably not a surprise to everyone but my wife and I first started ballroom dancing lessons in 1992 and we have been dancing, on and off, ever since. We’ve been going to classes at Milton Keynes Dance School regularly since 2006 and have made many good friends through dancing. Everyone assumes we must be really impressive dancers by now, but as we never seem to find the time to practice between classes, our foxtrot is still “going to be good”.

PHOTO FINISH Each month, we ask a colleague to capture an aspect of their life, at home, or out and about.

“It would be remiss of me not share an image from the opening night of Bradford as the UK City of Culture 2025. It was freezing but the atmosphere was absolutely amazing!” Bobsie Robinson, Vice Chair