Only Artists

The architect Amanda Levete meets the filmmaker Asif Kapadia.

Amanda Levete’s most recent work includes the bold new extension to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, as well as major buildings in Lisbon, Melbourne and Bangkok. Her earlier work, with Jan Kaplicky, includes the Media Centre at Lords Cricket Ground, which won the Stirling Prize, and the Selfridges store in Birmingham.

Asif Kapadia’s film Amy, about the life and death of Amy Winehouse, won the Academy Award for best documentary in 2016. His film about the Formula One champion Ayrton Senna was widely acclaimed, and he has also directed a documentary about the controversial football legend Diego Maradona, to be released next year.

Producer: Clare Walker

The opera singer Stuart Skelton meets the comedian, actor and director Chris Addison.

The tenor Stuart Skelton was born in Australia, and has appeared in leading opera houses and concert halls around the world. His most notable performances include the title role in Peter Grimes by Benjamin Britten, and Tristan in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, with the conductor Sir Simon Rattle . He recently made his debut at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, playing Siegmund in Wagner’s Die Walkure.

Chris Addison started out as a solo comedy performer and writer. He played Ollie, a hapless junior advisor, in Armando Iannucci’s political satire The Thick of It, and also appeared in the spin-off film In the Loop. He has directed numerous episodes of the Emmy award-winning comedy Veep, set in the office of the Vice President of the United States, and is familiar as a panellist on shows such as Mock the Week.

Producer: Clare Walker

Poet and novelist Jackie Kay meets Turner Prize-winning artist Lubaina Himid.

Jackie Kay is currently the Scottish Makar or poet laureate. Her first collection, The Adoption Papers, was published in 1991, and drew on her own experience as a black child, adopted at birth by a white couple. Since then she has written prize-winning poetry, stories and fiction, as well as a memoir, Red Dust Road, about tracing and finding her birth parents.

In 2017 Lubaina Himid became the first black woman to win the Turner Prize – and its oldest winner, at the age of 63. Her paintings and installations often focus on hidden black history and creativity - so for her work Swallow Hard: The Lancastrian Dinner Service, she overpainted willow pattern plates with images of slavery. She lives and works in Preston and is professor of contemporary art at the University of Central Lancashire.

Producer Clare Walker

The landscape painter and print-maker Norman Ackroyd meets the writer Robert Macfarlane.

Norman, who celebrated his 80th birthday this year, invites Robert to his studio in Bermondsey, London. They discuss their fascination with wild landscapes and islands, and how they attempt to come to a deeper understanding of place. They also share their thoughts on their working methods: for Norman, printmaking is like writing music - trying to capture and fix light and weather. For Robert, writing is a strange and solitary process: he reflects on the rhythm of prose and reads his latest “selkie” or seal-folk song.

Norman has been etching and painting for seven decades, with a focus on the British landscape - from the south of England to the most northerly parts of Scotland. His works are in the collections of leading museums and galleries around the world.

Robert has written widely about the natural world: his book The Old Ways is a best-selling exploration of Britain's ancient paths. In 2017 he published The Lost Words, a collaboration with the artist Jackie Morris, in which they aimed to bring nearby nature – the animals, trees and plants from our landscapes – back into the lives and stories of Britain’s children.

Producer Clare Walker

The poet Hollie McNish meets the actor Paapa Essiedu.

Hollie won the Ted Hughes Award for new work in poetry in 2016, and has published five books of her poems. Her most recent book, Plum, draws on memories and writing from childhood and her teenage years, along with her experiences as a parent. She first made her name as a performance poet, and her videos have received millions of views online.

Paapa played Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2016 - the first black actor to take the role for the RSC. The production toured the UK earlier this year, and also travelled to North America. Paapa first joined the RSC in 2012, shortly after graduating from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He has also worked at the National Theatre, and at the Tobacco Factory in Bristol.

Producer Clare Walker.

Natalie Dormer, who has reached a global audience through her roles in The Tudors, Game of Thrones and The Hunger Games, meets the singer and songwriter Tori Amos, backstage at the Royal Albert Hall.

Tori was born in North Carolina and released her first solo album, Little Earthquakes, in 1992. It has sold more than two million copies around the world. She has released 14 more studio albums, winning eight Grammy nominations. Her musical, The Light Princess, premiered at the National Theatre in 2013.

Most recently, Natalie has co-written the screenplay for In Darkness, a psychological thriller.

Producer Clare Walker.

The writer Louise Welsh meets the artist Duggie Fields.

Louise lives in Glasgow and is the author of eight novels, including The Cutting Room, Naming the Bones, and the Plague Times trilogy, which imagines a world ravaged by a pandemic.

Duggie studied at the Chelsea School of Art in the 1960s, and is known for his colourful geometric canvases, inspired by pop and classical culture. For the past 50 years, he has lived and worked in the same Earls Court flat- which he once shared with Syd Barrett, a founding member of Pink Floyd. A re-creation of the flat is currently on show in Glasgow - complete with paint-spattered floor, furniture, and life-sized photographs of the walls, covered in art-works.

Producer Clare Walker.

The fashion designer Sadie Clayton meets designer, artist and architect Ron Arad.

Sadie Clayton launched her eponymous brand in 2015, 2 years after graduating from Kingston University, and has gone on to show on the catwalks of London, Berlin and Shanghai. Her signature fabric is copper and her architectural designs have been worn by Gigi Hadid, Skin and Ellie Goulding, as well as being exhibited in art galleries around the world.

Ron Arad is an award-winning industrial designer, artist, and architect. He was born in Israel and went to the Jerusalem Academy of Art and later the Architectural Association in London. His career as a designer began in 1981 with the Rover chair, a recycled car seat anchored on a tubular steel frame, and he has gone on to design everything from furniture to eyewear to skyscrapers.

For Only Artists Ron Arad gives Sadie Clayton a tour of his studio in North London where they discuss serendipity, escaping the design label and what to do with two thousand plumbing saddles. The sketches they make of each other can be seen in the Gallery on the home page.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Singer and songwriter Tracey Thorn meets the film-maker and screenwriter Carol Morley.

Tracey Thorn formed the duo Everything But The Girl in 1982 with fellow singer-songwriter Ben Watt when they were both students at Hull University. Together they released nine studio albums, and in the mid-1990s their single Missing sold more than three million copies around the world. Since 2007, Tracey has released four solo albums, and published an acclaimed memoir, Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to be a Pop Star.

Carol Morley grew up in Stockport and was in a band by the age of 14, because she felt it was the place 'where real life took place' - although she now admits she couldn't sing. She later studied film and video. In 2011 she wrote and directed Dreams of a Life, an investigative drama-documentary about Joyce Carol Vincent, who died towards the end of 2003, but lay undiscovered in her London flat until early 2006. More recently she has scripted and directed Out Of Blue, based on the novel Night Train by Martin Amis.

For Only Artists, Carol and Tracey reflect on the art of editing, on whether the film and music industries have changed in the past decade, and the pleasures of writing - including the joy of finding an unusual rhyme when writing lyrics.

Producer Katy Hickman.

The actor and writer Maxine Peake meets the musician and performance artist Cosey Fanni Tutti.

Maxine Peake was born just outside Bolton. Her television credits include leading roles in the series Dinnerladies, Shameless and Silk. In 2014 she played Hamlet at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester. She has written for radio and the stage, and her play about Lillian Bilocca - who campaigned for better safety in the fishing industry - was part of Hull's City of Culture celebrations.

Cosey Fanni Tutti was born in Hull, and began her artistic career there in 1969, when she joined a subversive art collective called COUM Transmissions. Founded by Genesis P-Orridge, the group staged surreal events or interventions around Hull and beyond. Cosey worked for two years as a model for sex magazines and films to create a show about pornography and the sex industry called Prostitution. When it opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1976, it prompted walkouts, made headlines, and provoked questions in Parliament. Cosey co-founded the industrial music band Throbbbing Gristle with Genesis P-Orridge, Peter Christopherson and Chris Carter. Chris and Cosey later created their own band and now perform under the name Carter Tutti.

Producer Clare Walker.