At Threshold, we have always been fascinated by artists, their motivations for creating work and the ideas behind it. We are also passionate about finding pathways for audiences into the imaginative worlds they occupy.
Add to that Threshold’s collective commitment for ensuring under-represented voices are fully heard in the arts and culture industries and this Peer-to-Peer knowledge exchange programme makes for a powerful strategy for delivering social change.
Artists often turn to us when a project hasn’t gone the way they expected and need someone to talk it through with before making their final decision. There are times when an artist wants to take a radical departure from past practice or transition from part-time to full-time and we assist with the planning for that.
Our main role is to help the artist step back from the tree they’ve pressed their nose against to see the wider woods and navigate a safe path through them to the other side.
We do this over five 3-hour sessions. The format is always the same but each session is reconfigured to provide a bespoke experience tailored to individual needs. We look at past work and future ambitions and re-contextualise past experiences to draw a coherent thread from then to now. Often, that’s all you need to set some clear goals, identify some milestones and define effective strategies for problem-solving or future career advancement. It’s often the case that we also signpost suitable funding sources for the artist’s ambitions and assist them to make a bid.
One common role we take on is to oversee project delivery and finances for an artist who is making their first funding bid. If an artist approaches us before hand we can write our costs into that bid under the section for Personal Development; defining a tried and tested structure to oversee the creative decision making process of an artist’s project and ensuring everything is completed to standard, fully documented, on time and on budget.