Extraordinary Creatives
Extraordinary Creatives is a podcast hosted by Ceri Hand, a creative coach and curator, featuring in-depth interviews with exceptional artists and creative leaders. The show explores the ideas, processes, mindsets, victories, and challenges of trailblazers in the arts. Ceri aims to support 100,000 artists and arts leaders by 2025 by providing exclusive access to information and inspiration. The podcast offers practical advice and insights into art and creativity.
Episodes
What If Creativity Is Really an Act of Investigation? With PJ Raval
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 experience
How to ask for what you need without becoming 'The Difficult One'
'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
Why Making Bad Work Is the Secret to Great Art with Simone Brewster
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: ob
What Chronic Illness Taught Me About Creativity
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 r
Drawing with Light, Playing with Time with Reuben Wu
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 commissio
Why Avoidance Feels So Productive
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 procrast
Your Creative Work Matters and You Have The Talent To Bring It To Life with Ela Thier
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
Inside the Art Surgery - Thirty Minutes, Real Questions, Honest Answers
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,
Fast Robots, Slow Clocks: How To Design Art That Lasts Beyond Your Lifetime with Zander Rose
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 moth
Public Art: The Four Questions Every Artist Must Answer
I'm Ceri Hand, and this is Extraordinary Creatives. Thirty-five years in the contemporary art world as a gallerist, curator, commissioner of public art, institutional director, and now coaching artists and creative leaders worldwide to make a bigger impact and earn more money doing what they love.
Over the last eight weeks, we've built a complete commissioning practice together. We've looked at t
Late Starts, Long Breaks: A Survival Guide to the Art World with Hettie Judah
The art world runs on storytelling. The story of the artwork. The story of the artist. And one of the most seductive stories of all, the one that says if you got your toe over the line out of art school, your career goes onwards and upwards from there in a straight line.
My guest today, Hettie Judah, has been inside the art world since the early 1990s, as a writer, critic, curator and advocate. A
Why Most Artists Lose Money On Their First Public Art Commission (Part 8 of 9)
Artists – most of you who take your first public art commission lose money on it. Not because the budget was bad, but because nobody told you a public commission is not a bigger version of a private one. It is a different job, with a different shape, and the work that does not appear in the brief – procurement, contracts, maintenance, stakeholder hours – is what quietly eats your fee.
By the time
We Move Through Scales of Blue: Making Art That Holds More Than One Truth with Phoebe Boswell
Ninety-six per cent of Black British adults don’t swim regularly. That's the statistic from the Black Swimming Association that my guest came across while she was deep in research about bodies of water / about what they hold, what they absorb, what they promise.
Phoebe Boswell is a Kenyan-British artist whose work has been shown at the Venice Biennale and in major institutions and collections wo
The Six Roles Artists Get Hired For In Public Art (Most Don't Realise They Have A Choice) - Commissions Series, Part 7 of 9
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.
D
Building a Sustainable Truly Creative Practice Without Selling Out - with Luke Jerram
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 - piano
How To Stop Commissions Eating Your Profit (Part 6 of 9)
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 t
The Work That Lasts Speaks To What Is Stuck, Not What Is Comfortable with Lucia Pietroiusti
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 conversati
Artists, Get Paid To Think Before You Get Paid To Make (part 5 of 9)
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
Trust Discomfort As Part of Your Creative Language with Amartey Golding
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
Artists, Don't Reply To That Commission Enquiry — Filter First - Part 4 of 9
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 minds
Don't Wait For Permission To Build The World You Want To Live In with Ian Giles and David Shenton
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 throu
Your Commission Ecosystem: Four Decisions To Make Before The Next Enquiry Lands - Part 3 of 9
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.
Grief, Caregiving and Work That Shines Through It All with Alexis Soul-Gray
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 exh
The Five Signatures Of An Underpriced Commission – Part 2 of 9
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.
When Music Meets Image: Crafting Emotional Worlds On Screen with Tiffany Anders
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 Reser
Designing The Way You Want To Work - The Mindset Shift Behind Every Commission That Doesn't Burn You Out Part 1 of 9
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 th
Great Institutions Aren’t Built On Perfection—They’re Built On Permission with Joe Hill
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
How to Get Press as an Artist
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 run
Intuition, Research, Ancestry, and the Slow Unfolding of Ideas Through Making with Charmaine Watkiss
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 cur
When You Think You Said the Wrong Thing at an Event
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 go
Beyond the White Cube: How The Line Brings Art into Everyday Life with Sarah Carrington
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 Li
You’re Not the Least Interesting Person in the Room
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
Everyone Can’t Be an Arsehole
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
You’re Not Bad at Networking. You’re Protecting Yourself
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 Refusing to Stick to One Lane Does for Your Art with Guy Richards Smit
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, m
When Someone You Love Laughs at Your Work
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 f
Disaster as a Gift: The Long Game of Creativity with John Lloyd
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 pas
When Life Changes You and the Work Has to Change Too
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. M
What Performance Art Holds That White Cube Spaces Can’t with Wet Mess
In this episode I’m joined by the extraordinary Wet Mess - performer, shapeshifter, and maker of work that sits right on the ecstatic fault line between desire, politics, embodiment, confusion, and joy.
We centre the conversation around their solo show Testo that’s been touring over the past year. It’s a work born from a live, personal question: whether or not to take testosterone, and what that
When Life Breaks the Creative Rhythm
You know that strange moment when you walk back into your office or studio after something big has happened……and it feels unfamiliar. The light’s the same. The table’s where you left it. Your brushes are exactly as you abandoned them. But you’re not.
That’s the bit no one prepares you for. I was speaking to an artist recently who had just come back from caring for a parent after a sudden bereave
Inside The Artist’s Way: Simple Tools That Sustain Brave Creativity with Julia Cameron
Today’s guest has shaped the creative lives of millions.
Julia Cameron has been called “The Queen of Change” by The New York Times, and whether you’ve done Morning Pages for decades or only heard of The Artist’s Way in passing, you’ve felt her influence ripple through contemporary culture.
What struck me most in this conversation was her devotion to simplicity and trying.
Her tools are not comp
Stop Funding Your Own Burnout: Designing Commissions That Don’t Drain You
You don’t get a medal for exhausting yourself in the name of community.
A brilliant artist in my world recently asked a question that so many of you will recognise. Let’s call them Kenny.
Kenny runs socially engaged projects. They work with communities over weeks, sometimes months. Workshops turn into conversations. Conversations turn into drawings. Drawings become objects. Objects evolve into s
How to Build Creative Worlds That Last with Jenn Ellis
In today’s episode of Extraordinary Creatives, I’m joined by Jenn Ellis, founder of APSARA Studio and a curator whose work moves between institutions, vineyards, churches, theatres, and digital space with remarkable fluidity.
Jenn grew up in a family of theoretical particle physicists, studied law, and then pivoted into art history. That background shows. Her approach to art feels investigative,
Why Do I Keep Building Empires When I Just Want to Make Art
Do you ever ask yourself, why do I keep inventing massive projects when all I really want to do is make my own art? Why do I keep building infrastructures for other people when what I actually crave is to be in the studio, in rehearsal, on a stage? And why, at the end of these enormous, impressive undertakings, do I feel quietly resentful?
If this lands in your chest, stay with Ceri and learn how
Living Inside the Fourth Wall: Space, Colour and Care with Eddie Peake
Before we begin, a gentle note: in this episode we speak about death, grief, psychosis and depression. If you’re feeling tender, you might want to pause and come back when the time feels right. It will be worth it.
Today, I am joined by the extraordinary artist Eddie Peake.
Eddie builds exhibitions the way some artists use paint. Space, for him, is a material. He constructs environments that plac
When Your Brain Says, “I Don’t Know How” (It’s Lying)
When your brain says - I don’t know who would buy this, I don’t know where to find them. I don’t know how this would ever work, it is lying to you.
What if “I don’t know how” isn’t a fact. What if its anxiety dressed up as logic. What if your brain is quietly converting uncertainty into impossibility.
Once that story settles, you stop try. You don´t need to test formats. You don´t need to ask d
Building a Visual Language of Colour and Symbols with Sarah Boris
Today I’m in conversation with the extraordinary Sarah Boris, an artist who treats symbols like building blocks and colour like architecture.
Her practice moves between sculpture, drawing, printmaking, painting, and bookmaking, yet everything she makes feels connected by a rigorous, playful logic. You migaht know her Fragile UK Flag, a reimagined Union Jack made from delicate tape and paper, exhi
How Artist Websites Quietly Lead to Sales, Enquiries and Opportunities
If you’ve listened to the last couple of shorty episodes, you’ll know we’ve been talking about structure. What should be on your website. What can go. And how clarity does far more work than cleverness.
So today, I want to talk about what often happens next. Once your website is clear, calm, and coherent, something interesting starts to happen. Sales begin to trickle in. Enquiries land in your i
Making Ambitious Work is Never Just About Ideas with Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg
In today’s episode of the Extraordinary Creatives podcast, I’m joined by the inspiring Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, whose work sits at the intersection of art, ecology, and emerging technologies.
Daisy’s work explores the politics, value systems, and assumptions that shape how humans relate to the natural world. Her projects range from algorithmically designed gardens created for pollinators, to res
What Should Definitely Be on Your Artist Website
Today, Ceri moves to the next step of the artist website journey. Once you’ve selected the work and gathered the words, the question becomes: what should definitely be on the website? And just as importantly, what should not.
Most artist websites don’t fail because they’re missing things; they fail because they’re overloaded with too many pages, projects, and text and no clear entry point.
Your
Building a Creative Career That Doesn’t Burn You Out with Rob Lowe (aka Supermundane)
Today’s guest is Rob Lowe, also known as Supermundane, an artist, illustrator, writer, and public speaker whose work uses geometric shapes, colour, pattern, and words to create playful, philosophical, and deeply generous work.
With a background in graphic design and over 30 years working across the creative world, Rob has moved fluidly between indie magazine design, publishing, murals, community-
Why Artist Websites Still Matter and How to Make Yours Work Harder
Despite what we’re told, websites are not obsolete. Curators still look at them. Gallerists still look at them. Collectors still look at them. Commissioners still look at them.
Quietly. Carefully. Often before they ever contact you. Your website is where people go when they’re deciding whether to take you seriously. Social media shows momentum. Websites show coherence.
If your website feels ove
An Invitation to Work Relationally, Make Space For Complexity and Trust That Your Questions Matter with Filipa Ramos
What if artists aren’t here to fix the world, but to reveal what’s really going on inside it.
In this episode of Extraordinary Creatives, I’m joined by Filipa Ramos, a curator, writer, and educator whose work reframes art not as commentary on ecology, but as an ecological practice in itself.
Filipa is Artistic Director of LOOP Festival Barcelona, Lecturer at the Academy of Art and Design in Base
How to Get the Things You’re Avoiding Done
Today, Ceri talks to those of you who know exactly what they need to do but still can’t quite bring themselves to do it. Not because you don’t care. Not because you’re incapable. But because the task feels loaded.
It might be an email you keep rewriting. A proposal you keep circling. A conversation you know you need to have.
You stay busy. You prepare. You research. You tweak. And somehow the h
Creative Longevity, Instinct and Building a Practice That Remains True with Francesca Gavin and Seana Gavin
Today’s episode brings together two extraordinary creatives whose work has helped shape contemporary culture through a shared commitment to curiosity, counterculture, and championing unique voices.
Ceri is joined by sisters Francesca Gavin and Seana Gavin, each working across different mediums but united by a belief in following instinct and staying close to what feels urgent and alive.
Francesc
Selling From One-Off Events: Designing Afterlives for Ephemeral Work
There is something quietly brutal about making work that only exists for a day. You build it. You rehearse it. You hold your nerve. The room fills. The moment happens -
And then everyone goes home. You are left standing in the afterglow asking a question most artists feel ashamed to ask.
How does something this ephemeral actually support my life?
Not just my reputation. Not just my sense of mea
What It Takes to Build an Art World Artists Can Survive and Thrive In with Marcel Baettig
Today, I am joined by Marcel Baettig, artist, cultural leader, and founder and CEO of Bow Arts, one of London’s most influential arts and education charities. Over three decades, Marcel has quietly built a values-led social enterprise that provides affordable studios and housing for artists, reaches tens of thousands of young people, and continually reinvests in local communities.
This conversati
Should You Quit Your Job to Be an Artist?
Welcome to episode 179 of the Extraordinary Creatives podcast - Should You Quit Your Job to Be an Artist?
There’s a moment every artist fantasises about. The email sent. The notice handed in. The clean break. Finally, time, headspace, freedom.
But more time doesn’t automatically mean better work. Sometimes it means more fear.
So, Should you give up your full-time job to pursue your art?
Not i
Trust Yourself - Do The Work First, Worry About Explaining It Later with Eva Sajovic
Today’s episode is with the extraordinary Eva Sajovic, an artist whose art works provoke questions about labour, value, and exchange. We talk about how growing up with her grandma in the countryside in Slovenia shapes not just what she makes, but how she makes it and how that early encounter with political rupture still informs her resistance to spectacle, speed, and extractive systems.
We unpac
Working Towards Co-representation - Things to Aim For, Avoid and Know
Today we’re getting into co-representation, the realities of working with more than one gallery, and how to navigate it without damaging the relationships you’ve worked so hard to build.
You’ve built a body of work that has momentum. You’ve shown commitment to your gallery. You’ve done the shows, the fairs, the dinners, the follow-ups. And now you feel ready to build internationally. Not as a van
Art Beyond Identity and Authorship with David Horvitz
This week’s podcast guest is the extraordinary David Horvitz, an artist whose work has been exhibited at and collected by major institutions around the world.
Witty, poetic, and nomadic, David’s work traverses photography, artist books, performance, mail art, sound, the internet, food, and natural environments, engaging systems of language, time, and networks.
We talk about why artists should re
Regulation Is a Creative Skill: Why anxiety keeps artists busy but stops them finishing
Regulation is a creative skill - Anxiety keeps artists busy but stops them finishing. In the last episode, Ceri talked about the fact that you can't make work from a dysregulated life, that no amount of studio time will compensate for exhaustion, financial stress, unresolved anxiety, or a nervous system that never properly settles. Today, she goes a level deeper explaining why even when life is re
How Collectors Really Make Decisions with Beth Greenacre
Today I’m joined by the brilliant Beth Greenacre, a curator, advisor, and art consultant whose career has unfolded quietly but powerfully at the centre of the art world. Beth began working with David Bowie in her twenties and went on to oversee the care, exhibition, and eventual sale of his collection, revealing a deeply personal way of looking, collecting and living with art.
Since then, she’s b
The Studio Won’t Save You: You Can’t Make Deep Work from a Dysregulated Life
There’s a romantic idea that if you just shut the door, block the world out, and push through, the work will save you. That you can white-knuckle your way through exhaustion, anxiety, financial stress, hangovers, through everything else falling apart. For a while, maybe you can - willpower is powerful, but it is not infinite.
Ceri regularly see artists trying to dominate their minds instead of su
Enchantment as Practice: Making Slow Work in a Fast World with Sophie Coryndon
Sophie Coryndon learned early that craft is not decoration, but devotion, time, patience, skill, and care. Her work sits confidently outside conventional categories, moving between art and craft, history, and contemporary imagination.
This conversation is about enchantment in a disenchanted world, about beauty as a serious subject, about what it means to make work slowly with your hands, at a ti
You Can’t Build a Creative Life on Evasion
In this episode, Ceri explores the uncomfortable truth at the heart of a sustainable creative life - good mental health doesn’t come from avoiding hard things, but from learning how to move through them. It comes from learning how to deal with them, from building confidence, so that when life feels awkward, lonely, stressful, or uncertain, you won't fall apart or abandon yourself.
Yet so many art
The Year You Stop Hiding From the Thing You Want Most
I don’t know about you but for me, a new year holds up a mirror. Not the soft one that flatters, but the honest one. The one that shows you the thing you want most and the exact shape of the fear wrapped around it. Today is for artists who are done pretending they don’t know what they want. This is the year you stop hiding from the thing you want most.
Let’s make this practical, emotional, and re
The Courage, You Forgot You Had
I wanted to end this year with a simple thing. A thank you. A real one. The kind that comes from the ribs.
Because you might not realise how often I think about you when I sit down to plan these episodes. I think about what you’re navigating, what might help, what could spark a shift, or soften a blow, or give you a way through a knotty day. And I’m grateful that you’re here, listening, building
What Happens After - Turning One Evening into Long-Term Momentum - Episode 3 of 3
If you’ve been listening to this festive-season mini-series, you’ll know that in Episode 1 Ceri laid the foundations. The why. The what. The who. The purpose of staging your own event. And in Episode 2 we stepped into the how. The planning. The invitations. The rehearsal. The feedback. The choreography of the night itself.
Today, we’re entering the part artists often ignore. The after.
Because
Planning the How - Turning Intention into a Structured, Soulful Artist-Led Event - Episode 2 of 3
Welcome to the second part in Ceri¨s three part miniseries on planning an artist led event. This one's called planning the how turning intention into a structured, soulful artist led event. If you listened to Episode 1, you will remember that everything begins with clarity. The why. The what. Who it is for. What you want to learn. What you want to feel. That foundation changes everything. Without
The Why and What of Hosting Your Own Artist-Led Event Episode 1 of 3
For those of you who are new to the podcast, and for those of you who’ve been listening for a while, thank you for being here. As we reach the edge of the festive season, I wanted to offer you something special. A small gift to carry into the new year. A mini-series on hosting your own events as an artist. Not because the world is begging you to. Not because someone has given you the green light.
Design Your £40K Year Building Sustainable Art Income
This is the time of year when the studio hopefully gets a little quieter, inboxes slow down, and we start to take stock. For many artists, that pause comes with a mix of reflection and panic. The question that hangs in the air is: what will next year look like? How will I make it work — not just creatively, but financially?
If that thought makes your stomach tighten, you’re not alone. Most artist
How to Set Goals That Actually Work for You
It's that time of year again when we start reflecting on what we've achieved in the year and start thinking and planning for the year ahead. So, I wanted to record something for you on how to set goals that actually work for you.
Most artists I know aren’t short on ideas — they’re short on direction. It’s not about working harder; it’s about knowing where your effort will actually count.
Every
Sculpting Sound, Shaping Data: Memo Akten and the Art of the Techno-Lifestyle
Today, Ceri speaks the extraordinary Memo Akten — artist, researcher, computer scientist. For more than a decade, he has worked with emerging technologies, AI, Big Data, and our Collective Consciousness as scraped and shaped by the internet, to explore consciousness, perception, ecology and the politics of our techno-lifestyles.
He won the Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica, became Google’s firs
Stop Waiting for the Show and Start Making One
Some artists wait for the perfect show to appear, as if the universe will tap them on the shoulder and whisper that it is finally time to finish the work. But the longer you wait, the further away it drifts. Because unfinished work is safe. It stays in potential, where nothing is at risk and everything is still possible. And waiting feels easier than deciding.
But waiting is not how shows happen
In Between Worlds: Lakwena Maciver ’s Journey Through Art, Identity, and Staying True
Today I’m speaking with artist Lakwena Maciver, whose glorious work has wrapped electrical substations, transformed the Bowery Wall, brought hope into a juvenile detention centre in Arkansas, transformed Tate Modern and handbags for Dior.
All of this stemmed from a child drawing her own name to anchor a shifting sense of identity. Those early gestures became a life’s work centred on hope, connect
The Approval Trap Why Seeking Validation Shrinks Your Power
You can’t build a big, brave, creative life if you’re still waiting for permission.
In this episode, Ceri talks about the quiet poison of approval seeking, which keeps you performing instead of creating, editing yourself to fit in and please people who might never have seen your work. Or if they do, are too entangled in their own insecurities to applaud it anyway.
Ceri explains why so many artis
Building a Creative Life: Andrew Sabin & Laura Ford on Art, Risk, and Matt Black Barn
What happens when two sculptors build not just a life together, but a living artwork?
In this week’s episode of Extraordinary Creatives, I’m joined by Laura Ford and Andrew Sabin—partners in art and in life—whose decades-long dialogue between material, imagination, and place has produced some of the most distinctive sculpture in Britain today.
Their story is one of instinct, invention, and fearl
How to Make the Most of Participating in an Art Fair
Today, Ceri answers a question from one of her members that is likely to benefit every artist that sends their work to or attends art fairs. The question is - how to make the most of participating in an art fair? Some of the tips Ceri shares may surprise you.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Prepare your work – it needs to be robust, stable, easy to handle, pack and ship. Fragile works, sharp edges, or delicate su
The Art of Relationship: The NıCOLETTı Formula for a Vibrant, Collaborative Gallery
What happens when two people with very different beginnings—one raised in an artist family, the other hairdressing and DJing before turning to curating—come together to build a gallery that’s now shaping the future of contemporary art in London?
Today, I speak with Oswaldo Nicoletti and Camille Houzé, the duo behind NıCOLETTı. Founded as a curatorial project in 2018, the gallery has grown into a
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