Monday Motivation: Opportunities & Inspiration

OPPORTUNITIES

• Ideas and Pioneers Fund – Paul Hamlyn Foundation

The Ideas and Pioneers Fund supports people with unusual or radical ideas to improve the life chances and opportunities of people in the UK. The Paul Hamlyn Foundation is looking for ideas which relate closely to their own charitable mission – they aim to help people overcome disadvantage and lack of opportunity, so that they can realise their potential and enjoy fulfilling and creative lives.

• Development Awards – Princes Trust

Development Awards are grants of up to £500 to help young people who are struggling to access education, work or training due to a lack of funds. You can apply if you are a UK resident and are:

• Aged 14-17 and do not have/are not expecting to achieve 5 GCSEs grades A-C-(or equivalent), or

• Aged 17-25 and unemployed or working fewer than 16 hours a week, or in education fewer than 14 hours a week

INSPIRATION

• Article - What to do when work feels meaningless

• Video Series - Reaching Higher with the Irish News X Ulster Bank

LADIES, WINE AND DESIGN with alice Kearney

Ladies, Wine and Design Belfast was set up by Alice Kearney, a graphic designer, art director and illustrator working at Mammoth Design Studio in Belfast. We caught up with her to tell us about where LW&D started and how she hopes it's going to help the Northern Irish community of female creatives.

What is Ladies, Wine and Design and what made you decide to start it?

Ladies, Wine and Design was initially started by a New York based graphic designer called Jessica Walsh. While Walsh was working on a personal project called ’12 Kinds of Kindness’ with Timothy Goodman she realised she wanted to start the monthly gatherings to mentor and champion other women’s work. There are now Ladies, Wine & Design groups in over 170 countries.
I started the LW&D Belfast chapter as I thought it would positively add to the local design community and get some of us female designers together for fun workshops and social nights to discuss work, life and business.

What affect do you think/hope it'll have to the female creatives community in Northern Ireland?

I hope it builds on the growing community in Northern Ireland. We’re a small place and it’s my aim that LW&D becomes a perfect way to get to know other creatives in different studios and from different areas of the design sector.
It also gives people the opportunity to start new design collaborations that they might never have had the chance to do before because of these new found connections. I think there can be a lot to benefit from a casual meet up with a glass of wine (or two). Also, it’s nice to ‘like’ each others work online but it’s even better to put a face to an instagram account I’ve been swooning over!

What events/projects have you been involved with so far?

So far, I have organised a few casual meet ups for people to get to know each other but next up we will be attending the Drink & Draw in Town Square, Belfast on April 24th. This meet up is free so no excuses!
Then in mid May we have a screen printing workshop with graphic designer Pauline Clancy at Belfast Print Workshops. This workshop is now fully booked but we will definitely be doing more workshops in the future so follow us on Instagram or email us to get involved.

 What can we expect to see from LW&D in the future?

More workshops to get our hands dirty, more meet ups with wine (wine drinking is not mandatory to join LW&D! and to naturally create more design led collaborations with LW&D individuals.

Ladies, Wine and Design's Next Event: Drink & Draw in Town Square, Belfast — Tuesday 24th April, 7pm

LW&D Twitter
LW&D Instagram

WOMENFOLK - THE TIME IS NOW

On Monday 12th March, Womenfolk and Blick Studios hosted The Time is Now Panel, led by Esther Mogada.
The aim of the evening's event was to discuss ways in which we can encourage and support young, female entrepreneurs in Northern Ireland.

We were joined by four speakers who each work within different sectors of the creative industries:

Karishma Kusurkar, is a multidisciplinary designer who runs a small business creating accessories, games, lifestyle products and illustration. She studied Foundation Art & Design in Belfast at Ulster University and then went on to complete her BA(Hons) in Textile Design at Chelsea College of Arts at University of the Arts London. Karishma completed an internship for Topshop, which taught her design production within a commercial environment.

Karen Miano works within the music industry in Dublin, and now runs her own label which spurred from facilitation roles at music festivals. Throughout her early twenties, Karen worked three different jobs that had no relation to the music scene, but was approached by a customer in a retail job to take a role in stage management. She now hopes to work on connecting the two roles of Facilitator & Creator, and to inspire young people of colour to feel empowered to follow their creative spirits.

Aileen McEwen is a painter who currently works for the National Trust in collections management. She studied Fine Art: Painting/Printmaking at the Glasgow School of Art spends her days talking about powerful women throughout history and gets to learn how representations these women form our understanding of female power.

Geri Doherty works in costume design/styling for film and TV and has done from the age of nineteen. She is a founding member and producer of MELT Fashion Collective which aims to nurture the expression of self through fashion as an art form.

As part of The Time is Now, our panel examined Northern Ireland as a creative city. With its slower pace of life compared to many cities, it allows for more time to be creative. Belfast also has a much lower living cost compared to many other capital cities. This makes it easier to give up a non-creative day job and start a new business. The Internet and affordable travel mean we are still able to connect to other creative communities and bigger consumer markets around the world. We also learned that Lorraine Cunningham of Grainline Design and Sara O’Neill have created a hashtag #BuiltInBelfast, which they hope creatives will adopt for celebrating and promoting their work.

Each of these inspiring speakers taught us about how they got started within their industry and deliberated that there is no one right way to get into a creative career, especially in a field that still lacks a large amount of diversity. Our panel of differing ethnicities discussed being selected on merit rather than as a token representative to exhibit diversity. They also spoke of how female creatives are often wary of self-promotion and displaying a lack of integrity and may not always feel comfortable calling themselves entrepreneurs. For female creatives to start to resolve this difference within the field, our speakers suggested that women should remain authentic and honest; they shouldn’t be afraid to make mistakes, ask for help or admit that they’re unsure how to carry out certain tasks. Yet, at the same time, women must also give themselves credit, be proud of their accomplishments and not be afraid to put themselves forward.

SPEAKER #2 OF WOMENFOLK - THE TIME IS NOW PANEL

Aileen McEwen is a painter and is also pursuing a career in collections management in the museums and heritage sector. Her paintings explore ideas of illusion, desire and memory and are full of the historic spaces she works in.

http://aileenmcewen.co.uk/

Speaker #1 of Womenfolk - The Time is Now Panel

Karishma Kusurkar is a designer-entrepreneur focused on inventing new products with her brand Karishma's World.  As co-founder of Belfast Design Week & The Design Salon, Karishma is passionate about raising the profile of Belfast as a design destination.  She is an avid collector of postcards and a huge fan of podcasts.

http://www.karishmasworld.com/

"Womenfolk: On Inspiration" by Rebekah Johanson of Lines & Current

Since starting my online minimal accessory brand nearly three years ago, I’ve found that this thing of “inspiration” has been the key to being able to put out at least two new collections every year. As designer for the brand, keeping things consistent is really important as I really want my brand supporters to feel connected to every piece in the collection. It doesn’t matter if it’s a new piece or one of the originals, I want my customers to recognise the DNA in the design and feel connected to it.  But on the other hand, i want the customer a fresh experience and evoke feelings of excitement at the same time. As a designer, this has got me thinking about inspiration: How to be inspired and how to stay inspired. Here’s some thoughts.

Absorbing yourself in your work. Being consistent with research in your chosen discipline and creating a vision board for your work is a great idea. I use Instagram and Pinterest religiously when I am starting to flesh out new collection that my customers are going to want to buy, but often, this really isn’t enough and can just produce prescriptive designs that really aren’t part of a deeper story i want to communicate.

Be counter-intuitive. When I’m feeling completely void of inspiration, I do the opposite of the first point. I get out of my head and completely detach myself from the design work i need to do. I stop waiting for inspiration to hit. Rarely the bolt of lightning idea actually happens, but i devote myself to meaningful self-care. For me, as Mum to an eight month old boy, we go out for runs with a specifically designed “jogging buggy” and listen to a podcast that doesn’t have anything do do with fashion design. The designs that prove to be strong selling haven’t come as a result of hours on Instagram scrolling but have somehow materialised from daily life, travel and daily fuelling myself in ways that inspire and interest me. Detaching from the discipline for a time can be a great tool for reigniting the imagination. My creative outlets as a jewellery designer, writer and content creator have a cross-disciplinary element that all feed into each other and I find that taking the focus away from one of these disciplines is a great way to actually ignite it.

Consider that we are ‘Receivers.’ If there is a flow of inspiration in this life and we are open, perhaps we can be the receiver that ideas can flow through? This may seem a little ‘out there’ to some, but if you believe there is something grander out there, that there is an unlimited source of possibility, ideas and creativity, then just maybe, we can tap into this flow and rather than inspiration coming ‘to’ us, it comes ‘through’ us.

Follow Your Bliss.  I love the notion that to be or stay inspired I can simply ‘follow my bliss.’ Follow the inklings that guide you as a creative. They may be drawing from the well of inspiration you have been filling up over a lifetime. I try not to be overly concerned with the outcome or whether it will make money. Your passion is the currency you’ll need to bring your idea to fruition so follow what your gut is saying and what genuinely sparks inside.

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