CREATIVITY IN MANDURAH

If you read my piece about Open Studios, you know that Susan and I had an enjoyable weekend meeting artists in Mandurah and surrounds last month. I had the chance to meet more artists last weekend.

I was asked by staff from the Arts and Culture section of the Mandurah Council to chair a session on Courage and Resilence as part of a Creative Symposium on fundraising for local artists. We met at the Mandurah Performing Arts Centre and spent a day together exploring income options such as sponsorship, philanthropy and grant giving but also how to manage expectations and energy in the underfunded world that is arts funding in Australia.

It's very easy to access Mandurah these days via public transport - a train and then regular buses looping through the town. The sky was blue and the water still as I walked to the Arts Centre. 

I'm impressed by size of the Council's team of arts-focused workers and the range of activities they facilitate for local artists. For this symposium the attendees were mainly indpendent visual artists with the occasional poet, film maker and arts manager in the mix. The session was chaired by a very impressive artist/faciliator from Denmark WA, Bo Wong. She runs all sorts of workshops from leadership for creatves through to marketing and photography and she 'ran' us very well. A gentle, focused, effective faciliator - a rare skill in my experience.

At morning tea time, I meandered off to the Arts Centre's art gallery where there were three exhibitions. I fell in love with a print of Shakespeare and Company, the famous bookshop in Paris, partly because of my currently empty bookshelves given my missing boxes of books. As it turns out, the artist Gisela Zuchner Mogall, was in the workshop so I was inspired to use my fee for the symposium to give back to a local artist. 

In case you're wondering what I said about resilience on the day, I quoted (yet again) from The A to Z of Arts Management. The definitions of resilience, a concept that applies to both people and organistions, that I used were:

• The capacity to bounce back and recover from challenges
• The ability to let go of old ways of thinking and behaving and create new ways of thinking/doing
• A quality that enables flexibility and helps get over anxiety and di/stress.

The starting point to develop resilience is to have some  psychological balance in your life – activities related to family or friends, intellectual or physical, in addition to your art making or work. 

I’m often been asked what I do when I got tired or frustrated or exhausted or stressed in the challenging CEO positions that I had. I’d like to say that I did healthy things like yoga or jogging or meditation but my answer was more prosaic. When I was interviewed for the job as Managing Director of Melbourne Theatre Company one of the panel members asked what I did for relaxation. She was a Board Member but also a doctor and so knew the importance of finding ways to manage body and mind in a stressful environment. And she knew better than me, just how stressful that job was going to be.  My answer was swimming, books, travel and chocolate. And if I’d been totally honest, I should have mentioned the occasional glass of wine as well.

In a great book on non-profit management, the author Sandra Andirondack suggests long baths, music before bedtime, and giving yourself treats – all of which appeal to me more than serious exercise! And thanks to the creatives in Mandurah, I treated myself to a beautiful piece of art.