People Who Get What You Do

One of the biggest challenges I hear about in my mentoring work and other conversations with artists is about understanding your own creative practice through talking to others who get it. We all need to be able to share our ideas, confusions, challenges and talk through how to make sense of all the stuff floating around in our heads. Over the many years I’ve been doing this, I’ve figured out that talking to other people who get what I do is absolutely vital to making sense of what I want to do with my creative ideas. Building a community of creative people wasn’t ever my intention in the earlier part of my career but I now realise it was a case of creating what I needed, without even realising that it was what I needed. I built up my networks through group membership and going on courses in the early 2000s. I started my business / creative practice in the days before social media, just, so my networks were mostly in real life. Pretty early on in 2006 I discovered blogging and that created an online community which I was incredibly bowled over by – something I didn’t really understand before it happened. So my networks grew both on and offline through shared interests and the complexities of being a creative person trying to make it into a business. 

I’ve now been doing this for 18 years now. Networks, communities, business buddies and artist friends are absolutely essential to having made this work for all that time. I shared in a blog post in January about all the people I worked with in 2022 and how important that was for me. I really believe in the value of networks, communities and being able to talk to people who get it. At the start of the pandemic I noticed how much I was missing those networks, those conversations and sense of being part of a creative community. I realised just how important those things were to both my own creative practice and how I work with others. I love bringing people together to make creative magic happen – I’ve run artist groups and projects and networks and all of those in-person things which create energy in a room and inspire us all with our own work. So in lockdown I decided to start two things: a podcast where I could have the conversations with my creative networks that I really needed, and a membership where others could be part of a creative community and share their work with people who understand them.

For years I’ve wanted to create a publication, a modest magazine-style place to share some of my writing and more of my images of my work. Making Meaning Journal will be quarterly, or thereabouts. It will be printed in short print runs using vegetable inks on recycled paper to keep the carbon footprint as low as possible and it is only small, with 40 pages in this first issue. You can pre-order it now for £11 (full-price £12.50) here.

Creating the podcast, particularly, has been a challenge. It doesn’t make money, it costs money, but the value outside of finance is huge. I LOVE making it – or at least I love the conversations I have with creative people – I do not love the admin and marketing side of it. The podcast fuels me through the conversations themselves and the feedback I get from listeners who also love it. You tell me how powerful it is to hear conversations that resonate, that it helps you understand your creative practice too, that you feel you are part of the conversation and community. I love this. It makes it all worthwhile.

I really want the podcast to be listener supported so I don’t have to go down the advert route again (although I reserve the right to do that if I need to!). The new series is out now and will run until early 2024. I’ve got lots of amazing conversations lined up as well as a couple of specials. I’m also planning lots more for the whole of 2024 but I really need listener support to make it possible. I’ve created an ongoing fundraiser to hopefully make it really easy to support the podcast on a one-off basis or sign up to a monthly subscription.

If you love the podcast, please support us with 
a donation or subscription. Thank you so much

If you are looking for a creative community with ongoing support and resources to challenge your thinking and take your creative practice further, have a look at my Maker Membership. It’s a monthly rolling membership that you can join any time. I create workbooks, blog posts and videos about all kinds of things including research, creative development and reflection. There’s also a lively community who share their work and their thoughts via the members chat and we meet monthly on Zoom for a group mentoring session which is always really inspiring and encouraging. It’s £25 per month to join with no minimum term. Find out more here.