Introducing the Young Folk Un/Common People Project
Welcome to the first blog post in our new 'Young Folk' series. In celebration of our upcoming exhibition 'Un/Common People: Folk Culture in Wessex'. The 'Young Folk Un/Common People' project is a collaboration between a group of young people from Swindon and a local artist, with the aim to create a unique piece of art. In this post, we share our journey of finding the perfect artist, from shortlisting to interviewing and give a glimpse of what's to come next.
Who are we?
Hello and welcome from everyone here at the Young Folk Un/Common People project! We are a small group of young people from in and around Swindon who have come together to create a piece of art with a local artist, inspired by the upcoming exhibition 'Un/Common People: Folk Culture in Wessex'.
What is "Un/Common People"?
Un/Common People is an art exhibition surrounding the idea of 'folk'. This exhibition will not only explore the traditions and folklore of our local culture, but also what will become folklore in our future. Be it Morris Dancing or Creepypasta - it's folk!
Finding the right artist
When dreaming up our "perfect" artist, we all somewhat came to the same conclusions: we wanted them to be passionate, we wanted them to have a clear idea of their 'folk', and we wanted them to be comfortable working with young people with different levels of experience. It didn't really matter to us what form of art they would create because in the end, all art is in some way involved in folk.
Shortlisting
Now that we had an idea of who we were looking for, we had to find an artist that matched that description. To do this, we sent a call out to local artists with an idea of how they would like to portray folk.
As a group, we read through each artists portfolio and scored the artists, discussing pros and cons - it was quite hard to find cons with many of them. Then, once we'd read the portfolios, we had to pick our top 4 that would move on to the interviews; this was much harder than we thought it would be!
Interviewing
During the interview process, we had prepared a sheet of 15 questions to ask each artist, alternating who asked the question to ensure that we all had an opportunity to speak to them - It was difficult in deciding who might be the perfect fit for our group, but we all shared a similar positive opinion, and scores, on a particular artist. Furthermore, the artist we selected unanimously was chosen due to her impressive portfolio and unique creative processes that interested the group, as well as her kind-spirited character!
Next time
In the next post, we will introduce our chosen artist and what we plan to make with them.
Thank you for reading!
Victoria and Michael
Members of Young Folk
