Meet the young artists on our Creative Futures programme.

After studying music, Josh found himself wanting to explore more creative outlets. Find out more about his work with us, exploring the physical aspect of music and the process of archiving.

Name: Josh

Age: 22

Art form: Composition, Live Performance and Mixed Media.

What made you apply for Creative Futures?

Getting the opportunity to create new work alongside developing arts-based facilitation skills and knowledge with personal career development in my practice comes few and far between!

Having chosen to stay in Bristol after studying Music, navigating the “real world” was becoming an increasingly daunting prospect, especially as someone who wanted to continue to explore my practice as an individual and in collaboration and communication with a diverse community, but still had to earn money to live.

The Creative Futures project stood out as an incredible opportunity providing space, time, mentorship, guidance and the chance to learn new skills to implement into future freelancing.

 

Tell us about the piece of work you’re currently making.

When I began on the Creative Futures project, I started reading around the process of archiving in an arts environment. I’ve always been a bit obsessed with “collecting” and “storing” physical things, and the physicalisation of music and sound has been increasingly interesting to me.

This miraculously coincided with my discovery of a large amount of physical recordings, compositions, writings, drawings, photographs and objects made and collected by a relative of mine who has since passed. With my re-ignited interest in processing, organising and collecting physical things, I’m curating an archive of this mass of material in a single space that will give visitors the chance to explore the narrative disguised within these objects freely.

With these hundreds of recorded and processed sounds, I’m putting together a series of audio-visual compositions of my own to be performed live within the archive. Ultimately, I’m looking to explore the way I and others contextualise my music in all aspects; in the musical content and narrative, the relationship between music and visual elements, the physicalisation of the medium and the manner in which sound and music exist in a live environment within a physical space.

 

What are you most excited to do on Creative Futures?

Aside from creating this quite large work, I’m incredibly excited to be engaging with my practice in different spheres. As part of the project, having participated in plenty of workshops, beginning to facilitate my own workshops and engaging with individuals from a range of Bristol-based organisations, I’m slowly seeing how my extraneous engagements outside creating a single work can affect and develop my personal practice.

I’m on-the-edge-of-my-seat excited to continue to develop this over the coming months and begin communicating with young people through my arts facilitation to gather diverse opinions and perspectives that I anticipate will shape my work for the better!

 

Where do you see yourself at the end of the programme?

With the confidence and contacts to continue to explore my art and ambition to create through diverse mediums. I look forward to use the skills and knowledge gained from this programme to communicate with more people working in different mediums to explore how sound and music can interact with them and then work this into facilitation practice that encourages access for young people into this realm of “making” and widens the net of conversation.

Find out more about our Creative Futures programme.