For the next stage of As We Are, Might Have Been and Could Be  we are interested in finding out more about adults living in the UK, with a connection to one of the 22 Arab countries, who are not currently working in the arts but love to be creative.  

Through research, we found that there exists quite a lot of professional development opportunities for emerging artists, art school graduates and young people – which often cap participation at age 25 or 30. Yet, through the free mentoring offered by our curator, we found that older adults were interested in opportunities too, with many universal, but also culturally specific reasons stopping us from being as creative as we’d like. We have heard stories of familial pressure to study law or medicine which left little room for play, of mothers who after years of looking after little ones wanted to relearn old skills, and many tales of artistic careers back home which have been diverted by migration. We are interested in building a programme shaped by people in our community with these kinds of experiences.  

As such, we have created a short questionnaire to help us to understand a little bit more about how and why people are creative, as well as why not. It should take around 7 minutes to complete. You can fill in, or share the questionnaire via this link https://tally.so/r/44KRO5 

We are also offering free mentoring sessions with our curator for people who have never had an arts education, been out of arts education for ten plus years, or had a career break of 2 or more years. You can register your interest at the end of the questionnaire. There is a limited availability of sessions and they will be offered on a first come first serve basis, providing the eligibility criteria is met.