Today was our second day at Persistence studios talking about creative businesses. We had two more guest speakers and i particularly enjoyed hearing from Emilie Taylor. Emilie took the 'starting out' course 5 years ago and was able to form a plan with very clear ideas of where she wanted to get to and how she was going to go about doing it. Throughout she has maintained a job working with people who use drugs and alcohol and homeless people, this helped her to sustain her artistic practice and not only that but has lead her work in many respects. I liked how her work had this socially engaged element to it as well as creating work for herself. Below is an example of one of the projects she has carried out. Emilie worked with twenty residents from Phoenix Futures Residential Service to create large scale ceramic art works that depicted their individual experiences of drug use, dependency and recovery (see below)
She talked about the goals that she had set herself and what she had learnt along the way, i admired how she was able to stick by her values and beliefs, turning down work that didnt match up or coming to an arrangement that worked both ways.
I remember seeing her work recently in the Millennium Gallery's exhibition 'Force of Nature; picturing Ruskin's Landscape' (above)
