Extraordinary Creatives

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 the right place.

Let me start with a story.

KEY TAKEAWAYS


Before you draft a single document, you have to get honest about what you actually want, not what feels polite, not what you think people can afford, not what your imagined client might say yes to, what sustains your practice and keeps Your work alive.


You're not responding to briefs, you're filtering them, shaping them, and sometimes quietly refusing them. A commission inquiry is not an instruction, it’s a proposition. Your job is not to say “yes” by default, it’s to decide: Do I want to make this? Can I make it well, profitably, and without wrecking my sanity?


Audit your last two years of commissions: Which ones drained you? Which ones energised you? - notice the patterns. These will inform how you set up your commission process in future.

BEST MOMENTS

“When you define your process, your time and the kind of commissions that genuinely excite you, something changes. You stop bending yourself to every vague inquiry.”

“The hunger for work that feels human, specific, and emotionally resonant is only going to grow the work you make, the way you make it, the meaning you bring to it, that's becoming rarer - not less valuable - more valuable.”

“You're not responding to briefs, you're filtering them, shaping them, and sometimes quietly refusing them.”

"Your role is not to shrink in anticipation of rejection. Your role is to articulate clearly what you offer, how you work, and what it costs."

EPISODE RESOURCES

Julia Cameron episode - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/inside-the-artists-way-simple-tools-that-sustain/id1709105337?i=1000759449006

PODCAST HOST BIO

With over 35 years in the art world, Ceri has worked closely with leading artists and arts professionals, managed public and private galleries and charities, and curated more than 250 exhibitions and events. She has sold artworks to major museums and private collectors and commissioned thousands of works across diverse media, from renowned artists such as John Akomfrah, Pipilotti Rist, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Vito Acconci. Now, she wants to share her extensive knowledge with you, so you can excel and achieve your goals.

****

Ceri Hand Coaching Membership: Group coaching, live art surgeries, exclusive masterclasses, portfolio reviews, weekly challenges. Access our library of content and resource hub anytime and enjoy special discounts within a vibrant community of peers and professionals. Ready to transform your art career? Join today!

https://cerihand.com/membership/

****

Unlock Your Artworld Network Self Study Course

Our self-study video course, "Unlock Your Artworld Network," offers a straightforward 5-step framework to help you build valuable relationships effortlessly. Gain the tools and confidence you need to create new opportunities and thrive in the art world today.

https://cerihand.com/courses/unlock_your_artworld_network/

****

Book a Discovery Call Today

To schedule a personalised 1-2-1 coaching session with Ceri or explore our group coaching options, simply email us at [email protected]

****

Discover Your Extraordinary Creativity

Visit www.cerihand.com to learn how we can help you become an extraordinary creative.

This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/

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 Prize, Joe has built a reputation for shaping institutions that don’t just show art, but root it deeply in place, people, and possibility.

But this conversation goes far beyond titles and accolades.

We talk about what it really means to create cultural spaces that people care about—so much so that they protect them, claim them, and see themselves inside them. Joe shares stories of artists whose simplest ideas became the most powerful, why overcomplicating can kill a commission, and how trust—real trust in artists—is still one of the most radical acts an institution can make.

We also get into leadership. The kind that isn’t about control, but about creating the conditions for others to think, take risks, and occasionally fail. Because without that space, nothing new can actually happen.

This is a conversation about stewardship, risk, generosity—and what it means to build an art world that people don’t feel excluded from, but part of. 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

When an institution truly belongs to its place, it stops feeling like a white monolith you “visit” and becomes a living landmark people claim, protect and point to as their own.

The most powerful work often starts from disarming simplicity and deep trust: a crayon sketch on a façade, an artist given space to think, a curator whose first job is to nurture the project out of the person and to be generous to both artist and audience.

For the sector to stay alive, we need time and permission to think, to experiment sometimes get it wrong. Without that protected space for risk, we don’t just lose ambitious projects - we lose the possibility of anything genuinely new.

BEST MOMENTS

“If you get an artwork really right, and people feel ownership of it… nobody’s touched it… they protect it.”

“We have to create some breathing room to fail, because then we can innovate, we can test things, and not everything’s at stake.”

“The deeper invitation here - stop overcomplicating what needs to be clear.”

EPISODE RESOURCES

https://www.instagram.com/joe_hill_joe/

https://ysp.org.uk

HOST BIO

With over 35 years in the art world, Ceri has worked closely with leading artists and arts professionals, managed public and private galleries and charities, and curated more than 250 exhibitions and events. She has sold artworks to major museums and private collectors and commissioned thousands of works across diverse media, from renowned artists such as John Akomfrah, Pipilotti Rist, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Vito Acconci. Now, she wants to share her extensive knowledge with you, so you can excel and achieve your goals.

**

Ceri Hand Coaching Membership: Group coaching, live art surgeries, exclusive masterclasses, portfolio reviews, weekly challenges. Access our library of content and resource hub anytime and enjoy special discounts within a vibrant community of peers and professionals. Ready to transform your art career? Join today!

https://cerihand.com/membership/

**

Unlock Your Artworld Network Self Study Course

Our self-study video course, "Unlock Your Artworld Network," offers a straightforward 5-step framework to help you build valuable relationships effortlessly. Gain the tools and confidence you need to create new opportunities and thrive in the art world today.

https://cerihand.com/courses/unlock_your_artworld_network/

**

Book a Discovery Call Today

To schedule a personalised 1-2-1 coaching session with Ceri or explore our group coaching options, simply email us at [email protected]

This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/

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 running 2.5 million visitors a year through its doors, I'm sharing what I've learned about getting work covered, and what most artists get wrong before they've written the first line.

Before we get into it — if you're not already following the podcast, hit follow now so this lands in your feed each week. There's a lot in this one and you'll want to listen back.

We recently brought two specialists into the Coaching Membership for separate Expert in Residence sessions on this exact subject. 

Laura Davis with 25 years as a journalist, formerly arts editor at the Liverpool Daily Post and Liverpool Echo, now writing freelance and running Raised Voices - her audience-development practice. 

David Field — Cultural Communications Strategist and Business Development Consultant, with nearly 20 years in cultural sector communications across in-house and agency, now running a boutique consultancy working with art businesses, art fairs, publishers and galleries across Europe, the Gulf and Korea.

They gave members the publicist's strategic view in two separate sessions. Two complementary angles on the same problem - both available in the Coaching Membership on replay at  https://cerihand.com/membership/

KEY TAKEAWAYS


Most artists are sending beautifully crafted, completely useless press releases - a wall of text disguised as news - and then wondering why nothing lands. Until you can answer “why should this journalist care about this now, for their readers?” you’re not actually pitching, you’re just announcing.


Often, the pressure point isn’t the wording, it’s the structure: one sharp sentence of what’s genuinely new, one image that tells that story at a glance suddenly makes your work look like something an editor can say yes to.

BEST MOMENTS

“A press release is not a marketing leaflet for your work. It's a piece of writing aimed at one specific reader, a journalist on a deadline deciding very quickly whether your story is one they can sell to their editor.”

“If you can't say what's new in one sentence, you don't have news yet. You have an announcement.”

“Press is not the goal. Press is a by-product. The goal is to build the kind of practice, the kind of story and the kind of relationships that make press almost inevitable.”

PODCAST HOST BIO

With over 35 years in the art world, Ceri has worked closely with leading artists and arts professionals, managed public and private galleries and charities, and curated more than 250 exhibitions and events. She has sold artworks to major museums and private collectors and commissioned thousands of works across diverse media, from renowned artists such as John Akomfrah, Pipilotti Rist, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Vito Acconci. Now, she wants to share her extensive knowledge with you, so you can excel and achieve your goals.

**

Ceri Hand Coaching Membership: Group coaching, live art surgeries, exclusive masterclasses, portfolio reviews, weekly challenges. Access our library of content and resource hub anytime and enjoy special discounts within a vibrant community of peers and professionals. https://cerihand.com/membership/

**

Unlock Your Artworld Network Self Study Course

Our self-study video course, "Unlock Your Artworld Network," offers a straightforward 5-step framework to help you build valuable relationships effortlessly. Gain the tools and confidence you need to create new opportunities and thrive.

https://cerihand.com/courses/unlock_your_artworld_network/

****

Book a Discovery Call Today

To schedule a personalised 1-2-1 coaching session with Ceri or explore our group coaching options, simply email us at [email protected]

This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/

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 currently showing a new commission in the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition Artists First: Contemporary Perspectives on Portraiture.

We explore how Charmaine actually accesses her ideas. She describes the physical rituals that help her enter a flow state in the studio, how drawing, sculpture, and painting each unlock different ways of thinking, and why the work itself often reveals its direction through the materials.

We also talk about responding to museum collections, including her recent commission From the ones who came before… for Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery, where she worked with objects from the museum’s World Cultures galleries to imagine the women who carried botanical knowledge across the African diaspora.

We explore why her own figure often appears in the work, and the quiet but powerful role plants play in her paintings as carriers of memory, healing, and connection.

It’s a fascinating conversation about intuition, research, ancestry, and the slow unfolding of ideas through making.

KEY TAKEAWAYS


Ideas often begin as something half-visible - a feeling or fragment sensed before it can be understood. The work starts by accessing that inner terrain. Then the materials speak back, slowly revealing a direction you couldn’t have predicted.


Working with collections isn’t neutral; artists are in dialogue with what’s missing as much as with what’s there. Teasing out and sharing knowledge that would otherwise be lost or misrepresented.

BEST MOMENTS

“My wanting to connect to plants is because plants have the answers, and plants give us life as well.”

“I'm not really interested in making work about trauma. I'm interested in making work about emancipation and about healing.”

“She is not trying to claim a definitive narrative. Instead, she creates space for memory, reflection, and reverence. Her practice reminds us that art can be a form of cultural care and repair.”

EPISODE RESOURCES

https://charmainewatkiss.com

https://www.instagram.com/mswatkiss

HOST BIO

With over 35 years in the art world, Ceri has worked closely with leading artists and arts professionals, managed public and private galleries and charities, and curated more than 250 exhibitions and events. She has sold artworks to major museums and private collectors and commissioned thousands of works across diverse media, from renowned artists such as John Akomfrah, Pipilotti Rist, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Vito Acconci. Now, she wants to share her extensive knowledge with you, so you can excel and achieve your goals.

**

Ceri Hand Coaching Membership: Group coaching, live art surgeries, exclusive masterclasses, portfolio reviews, weekly challenges. Access our library of content and resource hub anytime and enjoy special discounts within a vibrant community of peers and professionals. Ready to transform your art career? Join today!

https://cerihand.com/membership/

**

Unlock Your Artworld Network Self Study Course

Our self-study video course, "Unlock Your Artworld Network," offers a straightforward 5-step framework to help you build valuable relationships effortlessly. Gain the tools and confidence you need to create new opportunities and thrive in the art world today.

https://cerihand.com/courses/unlock_your_artworld_network/

**

Book a Discovery Call

To schedule a personalised 1-2-1 coaching session with Ceri or explore our group coaching options, simply email us at [email protected]

**

Discover Your Extraordinary Creativity

Visit www.cerihand.com to learn how we can help you become an extraordinary creative.

This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/

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 got wrong. We’ve been building this over the last few episodes: what stops you going, what happens when you’re in the room, how you see yourself when you’re there. This is what happens afterwards - the replay, the spiral.  

This isn’t reflection. It’s rumination. And if you’re a creative person, you are particularly good at it, because your job is to imagine, to create meaning, to connect dots, to tell stories. Memory and imagination sit very close together in the brain. 

So, when something feels uncomfortable, you don’t just remember it. You reconstruct it. You fill in the gaps, you add interpretation, you build a narrative. 

And that narrative feels real, even when it’s not accurate.  

Today, I unpack why your post‑event spiral feels so convincing, how it quietly keeps you out of the rooms you want to be in, and share 3 practical ways to interrupt the loop so you can follow up and show up without the cringe.

KEY TAKEAWAYS


Artists rarely just leave an event. They are brilliant at rewriting it. That one sentence, that one look becomes: “I got that wrong.” “They weren’t interested.” Not because it happened that way, but because your brain decided it did.


When a warped version of how the night went is the only one you listen to, it doesn’t just make you cringe - it quietly edits your future. You don’t follow up, you don’t go back, you stay out of rooms you should be in - your career stalls.


Subtly shifting how you think about an event is all that is needed to get things back on track.

BEST MOMENTS

“Rumination is not about solving problems. It's about trying to reduce uncertainty and emotional discomfort - the mind loops not to find truth but to try and regain control.”

“The shift is - change your relationship to the thought. Instead of I got that wrong, try I'm having the thought that I got that wrong.”

“Give yourself a more grounded version of the event.”

PODCAST HOST BIO

With over 35 years in the art world, Ceri has worked closely with leading artists and arts professionals, managed public and private galleries and charities, and curated more than 250 exhibitions and events. She has sold artworks to major museums and private collectors and commissioned thousands of works across diverse media, from renowned artists such as John Akomfrah, Pipilotti Rist, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Vito Acconci. Now, she wants to share her extensive knowledge with you, so you can excel and achieve your goals.

****

Ceri Hand Coaching Membership: Group coaching, live art surgeries, exclusive masterclasses, portfolio reviews, weekly challenges. Access our library of content and resource hub anytime and enjoy special discounts within a vibrant community of peers and professionals. Ready to transform your art career? Join today!

https://cerihand.com/membership/

****

Unlock Your Artworld Network Self Study Course

Our self-study video course, "Unlock Your Artworld Network," offers a straightforward 5-step framework to help you build valuable relationships effortlessly. Gain the tools and confidence you need to create new opportunities and thrive in the art world today.

https://cerihand.com/courses/unlock_your_artworld_network/

****

Book a Discovery Call Today

To schedule a personalised 1-2-1 coaching session with Ceri or explore our group coaching options, simply email us at [email protected]

****

Discover Your Extraordinary Creativity

Visit www.cerihand.com to learn how we can help you become an extraordinary creative.

This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk