Colette Griffin
Artist Development Coordinator / Curator (UK)
Colette Griffin is a curator, creative producer, and artist based in Nottingham. Her interests and research centre on commissioning and programming that explores the architecture of our lives, the institutions and expectations that continue to shape everyday experiences, actions, and interactions.In 2021, Colette became the Regional Director (part-time) of CVAN East Midlands, part of the national Contemporary Visual Arts Network. CVAN EM is the free-to-access Contemporary Visual Arts Network for the East Midlands, celebrating and supporting arts and culture in the region and fostering an inclusive long-term future for the sector, emphasising equity and access for all arts workers.
Colette is Artist Development Coordinator / Curator (part-time) at Primary, an artist-led space in Nottingham that supports creative research through artist studios and residencies, public exhibitions and events. Here she leads on the development and implementation of the organisation's Artist Development Strategy, working alongside residents and partners to identify and generate opportunities for creatives based at Primary and working across the UK.
From 2020-2022, Colette delivered the New Midland Group Development Programme, an 18-month Arts Council England funded project looking to provide routes into contemporary art and better understand and articulate the value of artist development.
Previously, Colette was Curator at Mansions of the Future, an arts and cultural hub in Lincoln adopting an approach which privileged social, site-specific, and collaborative ways of working. Other previous experience includes working with Nottingham City Museums and Galleries, UK New Artists, and Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. In 2019 Colette was selected for CAMPUS, a year-long independent study programme in curatorial, visual and cultural studies, delivered by Nottingham Contemporary.
---
[...] It's interesting what you said about limitations and funding, thinking about geographies. I've worked in a number of organisations and institutions across both the East and West Midlands, but primarily East. Primary is an artist-led space located in the Radford Ward of Nottingham in Area 4 of the city, which is a particularly racially and culturally diverse area compared to the wider city. A lot of what we do is specifically accessible to and co-created with our immediate locality. For example, the engagement strand of our Public Programme aims to engage people living in the neighbourhoods that surround Primary through projects that are often co-developed with these communities. Other areas of programme are aimed at a more regional or national audience, especially our Artist Development Programme, which I lead on. For example, we recently delivered a project through a consortium we're part of called New Midlands Group (NMG), this was aimed at creatives based across both the East and West Midlands. The project formed an element of our artist development activity that enabled us to be more inclusive, equitable, and to think more about representation, something that is more complicated within Primary as we have a very static studio community. The NMG Development Programme focused on working with a cohort of 15 Associates, artists who were at quite different points in their careers, maybe had an unconventional arts education, and brought different lived experiences to the project.
A number of our residents have been with Primary from the start, for maybe 10 years now, and the cohort is majority white, and over 40. So we've been thinking about other ways outside of NMG that we can welcome new voices into the community here and support more individuals through the programme when we haven't got any kind of physical place for them at present. So for example, we've recently launched a membership scheme. Members have the exact same access to artist development activities as residents, they just don't have a physical space at Primary but they can use our public and shared spaces for meetings, to test out ideas, to document work, etc. And within that, there is a monthly cost, but membership is free to creatives who are under-represented in the visual arts sector and our own studio community, including individuals of the Global Ethnic Majority, those who are disabled, D/Deaf, neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+ or facing intersecting cultural or socio-economic barriers.
Thinking about other projects I've been involved with, I used to work at Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery, part of Nottingham City Museums and Galleries. At the time it was run by the local authority, and I was primarily working with the City's collection of fine and sometimes decorative arts and commissioning artists who were interested in responding to one of these collection or the archive. I curated an exhibition in 2018, which coincided with International Women's Day, it was an exhibition of work from the collections, all by women artists. It was really about getting work that was in the stores out there, work which was in a public collection but that wasn't being seen by the public. At that time, I was conscious of not just lumping women artists together with no kind of theme, so the exhibition was curated around women artists who responded to aspects of, or objects found in, their physical or cultural environments. The drive behind curating the exhibition was a need to respond to representation issues in museum collections, with only 5% of works in Nottingham City Museums & Galleries Fine and Decorative Art collections being by women artists, the majority of which were collected after 1980. Now, I recognise the issues with a spotlight show of this kind and the big issues that I wasn't addressing, such as the lack of work by Global Ethnic Majority artists in the collection and in the show that I had curated!
Another project I worked on was funded by Arts Council England (ACE) 'ambition for excellence' funding, it was called Mansions of the Future (MotF). It was an injection of cash, for Lincolnshire, an area with low engagement and low investment from ACE. This approach to funding in itself is both good and bad. What was good, in a sense, was that the very small, very stretched team could focus a lot of our own energy on this intensive three year period of activity, something we couldn't have done indefinitely. But there was no plan for the legacy of the project or a sustainable approach to working. We had access to a free space for that three year period only, with the building, which has since remained empty being owned by the Lincolnshire Cooperative. Unfortunately, the final nine months of MotF were very much interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which essentially cut the project short by radically changing what we could do and how we were able to provide creative provision, including access to free space for communities.
At MotF we facilitated a Public Programme and a Takeover Programme, and for us the Takeover Programme was extremely valuable, in that we were able to meet and support lots of brilliant groups, artists, communities and initiatives taking place in Lincoln that really just needed space to make things happen, which is what we were able to provide. The Takeover Programme offered up free space for educational, social or cultural activity, and it was entirely uncurated by the MotF team. This proved to be an excellent way of providing agency, acknowledging and platforming the existing and thriving creative talent that was present in a city where none of the staff team actually lived and where many of the artists we programmed didn't live either. The project came to an end and access to free space was taken away from those groups, and the lack of plan around what came next was unfortunate and careless really. I felt though that the project, while it was funded, was built on a really valuable and generous approach.
At the moment, at Primary we're looking at audience development, recently working on a breakdown of all of our various audiences of interest, and one group that we kept coming back to was 'project specific audiences'. We've recently delivered a really exciting partnership project with funding from the British Council, working with two groups of individuals that are based in South Africa and in the UK, looking at Black urban gardening. Ejaradini and the Landedess programmes had a very project specific core audience. We want to use this opportunity to reflect on the issues of working with audiences over short periods and not extending the offer into more long-term strands of programming, when doing so would essentially aid with audience retention and development, as well as seeing us establish a more generous approach to working with participants and commissioned artists. Though, often the programme at Primary does favour a long-term approach access to relevant funding can be a barrier.
Key to an increasingly generous approach to long-term programming is to carefully consider how we develop the relationship between audiences and Primary, considering the journey they take with us. So for example, maybe an individual has attended a couple of talks or workshops as part of a programme, we would then look to invite them to join conversations about the ongoing development of the programme that they've invested in, to support in delivering a session, to share their own skills and knowledges in for example the area of Black urban gardening.
I also work part-time for the Contemporary Visual Art Network in the East Midlands (CVAN EM). Last year we received a modest amount of funding from Art Fund to use in addressing under-representation in programming across the region, in dialogue with the CVAN EM Steering Group and a number of organisations located in the East Midlands. You want to deliver something that leads to organisational and structural change, but with only £5k the project was limited in its reach and impact, despite the incredible work done by the partners, facilitators, and creatives we worked with throughout the project. Again ambition was restricted by what we could do by the parameters of the funding available and the limited resources of the network, including staff capacity and support.
Why did you become a curator and do you have any specific focus?
I actually trained as an artist at Loughborough University, graduating in 2012. I think, for me, it always made sense that I was supporting others to make work and engage with art and culture rather than necessarily just making art myself. I've always been interested in helping people to make things happen and also in organising. I describe myself more as an organiser or facilitator than a curator, a term that I think can be confusing. But, I got into 'curating' while still studying, I started by volunteering at Surface Gallery, which was and still is an entirely volunteer-led space. Then, after graduating I applied for an internship, an unpaid internship, two days a week at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, whilst I worked part-time at Paperchase. I only started working in my first paid position in the arts (outside of invigilating) in 2014 after having spent a year or so volunteering. After working at Nottingham City Museum & Galleries as assistant curator of temporary exhibitions for 4 years I moved onto Mansions of the Future, which was very different, in the sense that I wasn't working within the museum environment anymore, but for a project that privileged social and site specific ways of working. I remember when I gave my Mum a copy of a publication we worked on at MotF, and that I had contributed writing to and under my name it said 'Curator', she'd never heard me calling myself a curator and couldn't connect to it, didn't know what the word was or meant. I'm from a working class background, and I think that the word curator is quite inaccessible. But yeah, in terms of a specialism, I'm just interested in making things happen, in helping people realise their creative ambitions, and supporting audiences in engaging with artwork.
Do you ever think about what feminist or queer curating could look like?
Always include an access line in budgets; work collaboratively; prioritise a multitude of different voices, think about sustainability and long-term change; and caring. A practical example of the latter could be when working with Mansions of the Future, we covered childcare costs and travel which supported the artists, who were based outside of the UK in visiting Lincoln for an extended period with their families, adding value to the experience for them and their collaborators.