Extraordinary Creatives

What would it be like to meet every version of the artist you’ve been over the last twenty years? That’s essentially what Andy Holden has just done. For his new book, Weight of Imagination, Andy re-performed works from across his career, encountering his younger selves along the way. The teenager who wrote an art manifesto with his friends. The young artist returning a piece of stone he’d stolen f...

What kind of art makes you glad to be alive? I don't necessarily mean the work you think is important, the artists you're supposed to admire or the exhibitions everybody's talking about. I'm interested in the work that gets under your skin. The things you find yourself thinking about years after you've encountered them. The things that make you feel more curious about being in the world. And I won...

What can art do about climate change that science, facts, and frightening headlines can’t? That question has driven curator Alice Sharp for more than fifteen years. As Artistic Director of Invisible Dust, she brings leading artists and scientists together to create something neither could have arrived at alone. Her latest project, Climate Clock, created for Oulu’s year as European Capital of Cultu...

At a recent exhibition opening, I was talking with an artist whose work I admire. We were looking at work that was beautifully made and meticulously researched, yet somehow, I wasn’t moved.  The artist described it as research that hadn't become art yet. I thought that was such an interesting observation, because it describes something I've encountered many times over the years A fascinating...

How does a sixteen-year-old looking for beer money become one of the world’s leading dealers in rare maps, selling extraordinary objects for millions and occasionally outbidding the Library of Congress? Today I’m talking to Daniel Crouch, founder of Daniel Crouch Rare Books, because I’ve always been fascinated by maps. They might look like records of the world, but they’re also records of how some...

What if the thing that you keep calling procrastination, lack of confidence or self-sabotage isn’t quite what you think it is? What if one part of you desperately wants the exhibition, the opportunity, or success, while another part is trying just as hard to keep you safe? And what happens to our creativity when we’re also carrying grief, uncertainty, difficult relationships, and everything that’s...

What do you do when an artwork you’ve been quietly developing for years suddenly goes stratospheric? And how do you turn a hit into a career-changing opportunity without sacrificing your health, your family, or the work itself? My guest today is extraordinary artist Freddie Yauner, whose work explores how our drive for continual growth impacts people and the planet. Held in MoMA’s permanent collec...

“I don’t know enough people” might be one of the most convenient lies artists tell themselves. And before you get cross with me, hear me out. If you tell yourself, you don’t know the right curators, collectors, commissioners, gallerists, or writers, you get to keep believing the problem is your network. You don’t have to risk contacting somebody. You don’t have to hear no. And you get to keep hopi...

Andrea Grover has spent nearly thirty years championing artists who take risks. And right now, she’s taking a few of her own. She’s turned her dining room into an experimental performance space called the Ponderosa Lounge. She’s started doing stand-up comedy in her fifties. And after ten years leading Guild Hall in East Hampton, she’s thinking deeply about what creativity, community and leadership...

Today, I am talking about a feeling that most of us know intimately. A feeling that most of us don’t talk about: Envy. This episode is about both kinds, which turn out to be the same machine running in two different directions.   We’ll look at what happens inside you when you hear someone else’s good news - the prize, the residency, the museum acquisition, the sold-out show - and feel th...

My guest today is the wonderful Italian-Australian singer-songwriter Gabriella Cilmi. Many of you will remember her breakthrough hit Sweet About Me, which became a global success when she was just sixteen. Since then she's toured the world, won awards, shared stages with some of music's biggest names, and now, after thirteen years, she's released a remarkable new album called Pure Love. It's soulf...

I was watching The Big Deal, the new programme with Steph McGovern on the BBC, and I came away with more thoughts than will fit into one episode. Most of them can wait. Today I want to use one thing from it, because it landed directly on top of something that comes up in my membership every single week. An artist has made a body of work. It went out once, into one exhibition, and it didn't sell. N...

Some artists spend their whole lives trying to outrun the work that made them famous. Others spend their lives trying to find their way back to themselves. Today's guest has somehow done both. Wreckless Eric exploded onto the music scene with Whole Wide World, a song that became part of popular culture. But behind the myth sits Eric Goulden: musician, songwriter, producer, writer and relentless ob...

There is a page in Emma's notebook that has been written out, in more or less the same words, most weeks for months. Five things on it. Email the curator she met last spring. Book the studio visit. Get the new work up on the website. Finish the residency application. And every week, in that big looping handwriting of hers, the same five things go down on a clean page, and by the following week not...

What does it really take to create extraordinary work with another person? Not just the exciting bits of making, but everything that happens behind the scenes. Building trust. Navigating creative differences. Talking honestly about money. Knowing when to compromise and when to hold your ground. And finding a way to keep making work together over many years without losing your own artistic voice. T...

I was looking at an artist’s proposal recently for a really significant exhibition, and it was one of those proposals where you can immediately see that the artist has really thought about the opportunity. They haven’t just taken some existing work and thought, right, where can I put this? They’ve responded to the place, they’re thinking about how people might move through it, there are new works,...

PJ Raval has spent his career asking a deceptively simple question: whose stories are we willing to see, and whose stories have we been taught to ignore? He's an award-winning Filipino American filmmaker whose documentaries explore identity, community, justice and belonging. Across films including Call Her Ganda, Before You Know It and Who We Become, his work follows people whose lived experiences...

'I don't want them to think I'm difficult.' I've heard that sentence more times than I can count, usually about four minutes after somebody has told me the best news of their year. They’ve landed a gig, an exhibition, commission. The residency they've wanted since art school. We celebrate, then the room goes quiet, and out it comes. What they're worried about is never the work. It's the hundred em...

Welcome back to Extraordinary Creatives. Today's guest is the remarkable Simone Brewster. Simone is an artist whose work moves between sculpture, painting, jewellery, furniture, architecture, and public installation. On paper those disciplines might seem worlds apart, but beneath them all is one beautifully consistent line of enquiry.  Simone creates what she calls intimate architectures: obj...

There's something I've been thinking about for quite a while now. It's something I've talked about with close friends, but hardly ever publicly. Not because it's a secret. And certainly not because I'm embarrassed by it. I think, if I'm honest, I just never wanted it to define me. But over the last few years, I've realised that by not talking about it, I've probably left out one of the biggest rea...

I first met Reuben Wu when I was Director of Exhibitions at FACT in Liverpool, and he was one of the coolest musicians in the city, co-founding the band Ladytron and shaping a distinctive sound that travelled around the world. Years on, he's one of the most singular photographers working anywhere - his images are held in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim, MoMA and the Met, and commission...

Welcome to the Extraordinary Creatives Podcast. I'm Ceri Hand. A former gallerist, curator,  now coach to creatives all over the world. I help them to make a bigger impact with their work and earn more money doing what they love. Recently, I have been noticing something, and I wonder whether you'll recognise it too.  We often think avoidance is obvious. We imagine it looks like procrasti...

We're told that creative talent is something you either have or you don't. Ela Thier has spent nearly 40 years disproving this crippling myth. A New York–based writer, director, actor, and founding director of The Independent Film School, she’s helped more than 65,000 artists find and develop their voices. Her films include Tomorrow Ever After, Foreign Letters, and her latest, 109 Billion Follower...

Every week inside the membership, artists send in their questions. Career challenges, pricing dilemmas, difficult clients, creative blocks, gallery relationships, commission nightmares, confidence crises. Ceri works through them live, unfiltered and at pace, with more questions landing in real time from the room. The result is one of the most popular sessions inside the membership. Fast, direct, o...

Somewhere inside a mountain in the West Texas desert, a clock is being built to keep time for ten thousand years. All mechanical. Wound by whoever makes the day-long hike to reach it. Designed so it´s chimes never ring the same sequence twice. Zander Rose has spent nearly thirty years building it. He grew up in a junkyard on the Sausalito waterfront – boat builders, artists, an activist mother who...