Signpost: Stepping Out as a New Artist: research for a professional manual for emerging artists

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This summer approximately 4,000 new BA visual and applied artists are graduating from courses across the UK . To aid their transition to professional artist, A-N the artists information company, whose readership is international, commissioned me to research and compile text and images for an online book Signpost: stepping out as a new artist—a new free-to-view guide designed to improve emerging artists’ chances of sustaining a career.

My role was that of researching the entire project and editing my research to a publication standard. The research question informing this project was to tackle the problem that although creative arts and design courses offer an rich array of subject-specific skill acquisition, what is less celebrated are the transferrable skills such as flexibility, resourcefulness, creative thinking and problem solving, time and project management. My research used the wealth of information provided by A-N’s significant repository of professional material. This research was complimented by interviews with artists to collect practical professional advice regarding constructing a career as an artist. The artists interviewed included Johnny Gailey, Ellie Harrison, Mark Gubb, Jack Hutchinson, Masa Kepic, Bethan Lloyd Worthington, Trevor H Smith, Emily Speed, Emilia Telese and Jamila Walker. I also devised a questionnaire for sixty graduating students to ascertain their level of understanding regarding what skills and knowledge were needed for an artistic career.

My research also extended to other organisations and professional bodies including Artquest, Axisweb and DACS. The resulting online book is a resource that will sustain new artists as they negotiate the first few years out of higher education. Currently A-N are in process of organising a series of workshops based on the content of the publication.

Signpost is available as an online book and as a pdf download.
http://www.a-n.co.uk/publications/topic/91712