Creative Career Experiences with Artswork Staff: Part 2
Artswork staff are back to share the diverse and surprising journeys that led them into careers across the creative, cultural, and heritage sector.
The creative, cultural, and heritage sector is built on countless individual career journeys, and just like Part 1 of this series, Part 2 shares even more of the diverse routes Artswork staff have taken into the creative industries. This time, their stories highlight the development of long-lasting transferable skills, having courage to navigate tasks outside their comfort zone, and discovering how useful maths can be when shaping a creative career.
My first creative job was working in an art supplies and framing shop as a shop assistant. It was a lovely independent business, and I was surrounded by creative people. My role was stocking art supplies, making supply recommendations to customers, measuring artworks, and choosing mounts and frames for bespoke framing. Despite the lovely atmosphere there wasn’t really any progression; I did learn a lot about colour theory and did a surprising amount of maths when measuring for frames and calculating prices! I found the role because it was my local supply shop where I bought bits for my GCSE art, a friend was leaving and recommended me for her position! – Lucy C
My first job in the cultural sector was as a Youth Trainee on the YTS (Youth Training Scheme), so very similar to Breakthrough. It was unpaid but we were given Income Support, and my rent was paid through Housing Benefit. I was a Publications Assistant for the charity that is now The Art Fund, who give funding support to museums and galleries wanting to build their collections and to make them more accessible to the public.
I helped to do everything basic needed to produce a quarterly membership magazine, an annual review publication that did stories on all the main art and objects that the charity had helped museums to acquire, and all their other marketing literature including a set of Christmas cards every year. The best part was finding out about the art and helping to tell the stories; the worst part was selling advertising – completely terrifying! Getting the job was a combination of the Job Centre and responding to an advert in the Guardian (would be Guardian Jobs now).
I knew absolutely no one in the arts, had no connections, network or experience in publishing, but really they wanted someone who loved art and didn’t mind doing boring admin.
They told me later they liked my enthusiasm, the fact that I’d researched the charity, and that I asked them questions about what they really needed, so I wasn’t just focused on me. – Louise G
I think my first culture sector work experience was volunteering at the National Art Library (in the V&A) collating journals for binding. My task was to go through the shelves of old art periodicals (like the Art Journal which was the key one in Victorian times) find all the issues for a particular year, order them in the correct sequence, tie them together in the right order with slip with instructions for the bindery and put them on a trolley that I then had to push to the place where it was collected. I found this task gruellingly repetitive and lonely.
However, the journals themselves were fascinating, not least the waspish reviews of exhibitions. In my later curatorial career, I found that delegating that kind of task to more detail-oriented and self-contained colleagues or volunteers usually got a better result. I’m much better suited to working in a team.
My retail and waitressing jobs gave me loads of transferrable learning about being customer-focused, dealing with people issues, handling finances, and organising resources that became much more useful as my museum career progressed. – Lucy M