What kind of a year has 2014 been for you?
2014 has been an extraordinary year with a huge range of exceptional work taking place across Scotland. My highlights included Generation, the partnership between Creative Scotland, the National Galleries of Scotland and Glasgow Life, celebrating 25 years of Scottish contemporary art with more than 60 exhibitions across the country; the National Theatre of Scotland’s James Plays by Rona Munro, which have just won the Nook Award for Best Play at the Evening Standard Awards; and Hanna Tuulikki’s poignant and intimate Away with the Birds, performed in the sea off the island of Canna, fusing Gaelic and birdsong and encapsulating the strength of Scotland’s spirit and sure sense of self.
What has changed for the better and what, if anything, has changed for the worse?
Creative Scotland has a stronger shape with clear plans and routes to funding now in place. We’ve redesigned the way we fund to generate better clarity on what people can apply for and how we make our decisions. We’re also shifting our emphasis into a more collaborative way of working with people both internally and externally.
Creative Scotland already draws on the expertise of artists and creative practitioners through the many conversations we have every day through all of our staff, as well as through the more formal work we are carrying out with our sector reviews, which this year include literature and the visual arts. This has meant resetting our relationships and listening and learning across everything we do. Doing this has enabled us to begin to operate more confidently and responsibly as funders, developers, influencers and advocates on behalf of artists and creative people working across Scotland.
A major move for us is to work in partnership with other public bodies. We hold a joint post, a Gaelic Arts and Culture Officer with Bòrd na Gàidhlig, and this year we announced that our new Director of Creative Industries would be a joint post with the Scottish Funding Council, a unique innovation and one which I think could be transformative for this aspect of our work.
Although we’re confident we’re establishing a strong new platform to build from, we’re acutely mindful of the current economic challenges and ongoing pressures on public spending. We’re planning a major international conference in the autumn of 2015 which will focus on the value of the arts to society both in terms of individual and community wellbeing and economic growth.
What do you wish hadn’t happened this year?
I wish we hadn’t had to say no to so many of the people who applied to us for regular funding. We received many more fundable applications than we were able to support. Scotland is rich in terms of its arts and creative talent – sustaining this requires more support than we are, alone, able to provide. Helping identify new sources of funding, both public and private, is an important challenge.
What do you wish had happened this year, but didn’t?
I wish Dundee had won UK City of Culture, although of course congratulate Hull as the winner of this well deserved accolade. It’s great though that Dundee has just been named a UNESCO City of Design alongside Scotland’s UNESCO Cities of Music and Literature in Glasgow and Edinburgh.
What would you characterise as your major achievement this year and why?
I think our major achievement has been the publication of our ten-year shared plan, Unlocking Potential, Embracing Ambition. It’s a plan with bold ambitions created through dialogue and feedback from over a 1000 people. I’m also proud of the staff we’ve appointed right across the organisation, including Leonie Bell who is our exceptional Director of Arts.
Is there anything you’d like to have done this year but haven’t?
One of the struggles for any public body is how to have meaningful regular relationships with artists and individual creative practitioners. We’ve begun to get better at this but I still think there is a way to go. I’d like to begin a dialogue on how we can achieve this from 2015. I want us to move from talking to the same people as we always have, to include a more diverse and more wide ranging set of conversations with people who can bring new thinking into our policy making and consequent decision making. I’m hoping that our arts strategy, scheduled to be published next year, will give us the opportunity to do this. This will sit alongside our film strategy, now published, and our draft creative industries strategy framework, scheduled for consultation early in the new year, which will outline our ambition in respect of the commercial creative area of our remit.
What would make 2015 a better year than 2014?
I’d like us to continue to develop closer working relationships with the media in Scotland, the UK and internationally. Journalists and broadcasters have an important role to play in lifting awareness of the value of the arts. We want to work with them to continue to make the case that the arts matter a great deal to people everywhere, contributing to our cultural wealth, our personal and collective wellbeing, and our economic sustainability. We’re also planning to negotiate much stronger, more consistent relationships with the 32 local authorities across Scotland. Understanding place and local communities is incredibly important for a national body like us.
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