Pavel speaks about the ever-changing definition of art, art being useless but having a purpose, ‘adding depth to talent’, the importance of experiencing a work of art and learning how to attend to it, the many ways art education has changed, showcasing, studio-groups, and his observations of today.

It’s Carnival!

Charles talks to me about the influence that building dens, rafts and dams during his childhood had on the way he approaches projects, blagging being an important skill, unofficially turning street lights on, interrogating cities, and being able to do things in Preston he wouldn’t be able to do elsewhere.

Nina tells me about her background in embroidery and the difficulty of trying to remove its influence from her work, as well as her own, how the unanswerable question of “what is art?” keeps driving her towards it, leaps of faith, being a nurse, emotional resilience, and her love of paper.

Emma speaks to me about being denied access to the film department at the start of her Fine Art degree, becoming good at faking being a natural painter, her interest in scripts, screenplays, table reads and gifs, using academic platforms as an arena for performance, and being a self-declared harridan.

Pete talks with me about his differences with the hierarchy of image making in art education, why he always fought for every student, his artistic career taking off when he was unemployed and hopefully again now in retirement, bailiffs attempting to take his life work, and making art an adventure.

Michael chats to me about never documenting his work and letting it exist as oral history, being a trouble causer, how a dyslexia test gave his work a visual identity, setting up a new foundation course and gallery in Scunthorpe, and now running the only foundation course in South America.

Garry tells me about how making instructional drawings of machinery took him from his apprenticeship as an overhead crane fitter in Dudley to art school under the tutelage of Keith Arnatt, working as an industrial interior designer, his over four decades as an educator, and the importance of balancing the intellectual with the psychical.

Chris speaks about the influence of skateboarding and Quakerism on himself as an artist, establishing the English Disco Lovers group that sought to oppose and overtake the English Defence League, receiving death threats, not mentioning Michael Ashcroft, tucking in Marina Abramović and being among the youngest ever to give the Swarthmore Lecture.

Pamela speaks with me about not trusting memories, recording voices, giving sorrow words, kindness as a force, setting up a creative mothers peer support network, and how receiving Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing therapy to recover from the trauma of Guillain-Barré syndrome gave her a new found resolve to pursue her work.