Extraordinary Creatives

Artists if you've ever been invited into a public art commission, here's the thing nobody tells you. Most of you assume you've been asked to make a single artwork. A sculpture, an installation, a piece. You usually haven't. There are six different roles you might be playing inside that project, and getting the wrong one means you've quietly accepted a job you didn't sign up for. Worse hours. Diffe...

Imagine setting fire to half your art budget before lunchtime. Seven hot air balloons grounded in a field. Fourteen speakers. The Birmingham Symphony Orchestra waiting to be paid. And a city council expecting you to reach a hundred thousand people by the end of the week. That is the kind of corner Luke Jerram has found himself in. And it is also the corner that produced Play Me, I'm Yours - pianos...

Artists — if you take commissions, here's the number that should frighten you. Scope drift, the polite, gradual expansion of a commission beyond what you agreed, eats twenty to thirty per cent of the original fee in unpaid work on most commissions I see. That isn't a margin problem. That's your profit. Gone. On every job. And it isn't because you did bad work. It's because nobody taught you how to...

The art that stays with you isn't the art that pleases you. It's the art that names the thing stuck at the back of your throat — the one you couldn't quite say out loud — and then makes it real. That's Lucia Pietroiusti. Curator of the Golden Lion-winning Sun & Sea, Head of Research & Emergence at the new Hartwig Museum in Amsterdam and Curator of The 2027 Autostrada Biennale. In this conversation...

This episode is part of a nine-part series on commissions. How to prepare for them, respond to them, deliver them, and, crucially, how to stop them burning you out. If you haven't followed the podcast yet, hit follow so you don't miss an episode. Today, episode 5 of 9 - If you only listen to one, I would ask that it be this one. Because I am going to tell you about the single biggest shift most ar...

Amartey Golding makes chainmail sculptures that are seductive, threatening, funny, and deeply unsettling all at once. And in this conversation, he explains why discomfort might be one of the most important tools an artist has. Raised between London, Ghana, Rastafarian culture, council estates, and rural England, Amartey speaks with rare honesty about growing up between identities and how that tens...

This episode is part of a nine-part series on commissions. How to prepare for them, respond to them, deliver them, and, crucially, how to stop them burning you out. If you haven't followed the podcast yet, hit follow so you don't miss an episode. Today, episode four of nine. And this is where the series shifts gears. For the last three episodes, we have been doing the preparation work. The mindset...

I have two guests on the podcast today, and they have made something extraordinary together. The first drew queer Britain into being for sixty years and quietly refused to call any of its art. It paid the mortgage. It was cheaper than being a window cleaner. He published the world's first LGBTQ+ graphic novel in 1983, drew for Gay News, Capital Gay and The Guardian, made safer-sex campaigns throug...

This episode is part of a nine-part series on commissions. How to prepare for them, respond to them, deliver them, and, crucially, how to stop them burning you out. If you haven't followed the podcast yet, hit follow so you don't miss an episode. Today, episode three of nine. The first practical stage of the commission process. Your commission ecosystem. In episode one, we did the mindset work. In...

Today’s guest is an extraordinary artist whose work feels deeply lived rather than simply made. Alexis Soul-Gray is a British painter exploring memory, loss, and maternal lineage through richly layered works that move between abstraction and figuration. Based in Devon, her paintings feel both intimate and expansive. A graduate of the Royal College of Art and Central Saint Martins, Alexis has exhib...

This episode is part of a nine-part series on commissions. How to prepare for them, respond to them, deliver them, and, crucially, how to stop them burning you out. If you haven't followed the podcast yet, hit follow so you don't miss an episode. Today, episode two of nine. The five mistakes I see every artist make when pricing commissions. I see them every single week. In coaching conversations....

Today’s guest is someone who quite literally shapes how stories feel. Tiffany Anders is a music supervisor working across film, television, and advertising, and if you’ve ever been completely pulled into a scene emotionally, there’s a good chance someone like Tiffany helped build that experience. Her work spans everything from the Sundance-winning indie film Like Crazy to major series like Reserva...

This episode is part of a nine-part series on commissions. How to prepare for them, respond to them, deliver them, and, crucially, how to stop them burning you out. If you haven't followed the podcast yet, hit follow so you don't miss an episode. Today, episode one of nine. The mindset. Because nothing in the practical work across the next eight episodes actually holds if the mindset is not in the...

What does it take to lead an institution in a way that people don’t just visit—but feel they belong to? Today, I’m in conversation with the extraordinary Joe Hill—Director and Chief Executive of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and formerly the force behind Towner Eastbourne’s transformation into one of the UK’s most dynamic cultural spaces. From winning Art Fund Museum of the Year to hosting the Turner...

Whether you plan on doing your own press, or working with a publicist, you need to understand how press actually works. Because if you don't, you can't brief a PR person well, you can't tell whether the one you're paying is any good, and you certainly can't do it yourself. After 35 years of generating press for individual artists, commercial galleries, biennials, festivals, and an institution runn...

My guest today is the artist Charmaine Watkiss, whose extraordinary creative journey took her through film, shoemaking, and advertising before she became fully wedded to her art practice. It’s a path that has given her work a deep sense of craft, storytelling and material sensitivity and I know will inspire so many of you. Her paintings are held in public collections across the UK, and she is curr...

You leave the event. At first, it’s fine. And then, somewhere between the coat rack and the journey home, it starts -  That conversation, that sentence, that moment you wish you could rewind. Why did I say that? That sounded awkward. I should’ve said something else. They probably think I’m …. And just like that, the whole night begins to shift. Not as it happened, but as a story about what you got...

Today’s episode takes us out of the white cube and into the open air. My guest is Sarah Carrington, Director of The Line, the public art trail connecting Greenwich to Stratford along the waterways of East London. If you’ve ever stumbled across an unexpected sculpture beside a canal, or discovered art while simply walking through the city, then you already understand the quiet magic of what The Lin...

Have you ever walked into a room and instantly thought: They all know more than me. They’re further ahead. They’re more established. They’ve got better work, better contacts, better everything. And before you’ve even opened your mouth… You’ve already decided your position. Somewhere near the bottom. Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been looking at what stops you in these spaces. First, the sto...

Have you ever left an event and thought: "My God, those people are dull." "People were so rude." "No one made me feel welcome." "Blimey, I’m not doing that again." And by the time you get home, it’s not just the event. It’s confirmation - "The art world isn’t for me." But if that’s the story you keep leaving with… it’s worth asking what’s really going on – After all, not everyone in that room can...

There’s something I hear all the time from artists, and it sounds very reasonable on the surface. “If I go to that event, it’s going to drain me", "I won’t have the energy.”  “I’ll feel awkward.”  Sometimes you are genuinely exhausted, and the most intelligent thing you can do is not push through, but actually attend to your body, your mind, your nervous system. That’s not avoidance. That’s care....

What can an ink drawing and one line of text really do? In the hands of Guy Richards Smit, it can hold horror and humour in the same breath. It can slice through politics while pretending to be an amuse-bouche between heavier courses. It can make you laugh, wince, and then realise you’ve been implicated. Born and raised in New York City, Guy is a painter, performer, musician, video artist and, mor...

It’s one thing when a stranger laughs at your art. It’s another when someone who knows you well does. Who laughs matters. A friend scrolling your website and snorting at an image. A partner chuckling at a line in your artist statement. A respected curator friend laughing during a performance, but not at the moment you expected.  Those laughs land differently. They don’t feel like feedback. They fe...

Welcome to the 200th episode of Extraordinary Creatives: two hundred conversations with artists, thinkers, makers and cultural leaders about the strange, beautiful, often messy reality of building a creative life. And I couldn’t imagine a better guest to mark this moment than the brilliant John Lloyd CBE. One of the great creative architects behind some of the most loved comedy formats of the past...

In the last episode, we talked about rhythm.  About what happens when life knocks you sideways and you walk back into the studio feeling foggy, brittle, or slightly foreign to yourself. We spoke about regulation, about re-entry, about restarting the engine gently instead of demanding brilliance on command. But there’s something else that often happens after the dust settles. Something quieter. Mor...