Working Space

This session will explore the current funding landscapes and how you can support your creative career. For this event we will hear from two  practitioners with a wealth of experiences in the creative industries. Attend this session to discover the strategies they have adopted to support their work, including; portfolio building, applying to funding streams and securing commissions.

Guest Speakers:
Molly Hankinson is a Glasgow-based artist from London. Her work interrogates and celebrates ‘safe spaces and the people who occupy them’, weaving narratives of collective gendered experiences into her bright, bold and unapologetic artworks. Overall, Molly is particularly interested in how her art can evoke a feeling, offer comfort, and serve as sites of power. She has painted at mural festivals across the UK and Europe, exhibited in group shows across the UK and has artworks as part of private collections in the UK, Ireland and the US. Selected clients include Tramway, The Glasgow School of Art, The Body Shop, Chivas Regal, the FA and SFA, and Lucozade. www.mollyhankinson.com

Medeia Cohan-Petrolino is a fundraising expert who specialises in helping artists and organisations turn big ideas into reality. She has raised major investment for ambitious cultural projects, built innovative patron programmes, and created partnerships that open doors to new opportunities. A natural connector, Medeia believes fundraising is less about asking for money and more about building meaningful relationships and shared purpose. She has taught these skills internationally, encouraging creative people to see fundraising as not only possible, but as an essential part of sustaining their practice.

The creative industries have a high percentage of self-employed professionals who freelance and work for themselves. In fact, statistics show that 40% of the workforce is made up of freelancers* For this session, we are delighted to welcome a multi-award-winning silversmith and GSA graduate, Scott Smith, and Rekha Barry-Houston, who will discuss their journey to becoming self-employed, what they have learnt along the way, and provide advice and tips to support you to launch your creative business too.

Guest Speakers:
Rekha Barry-Houston is an Architect and founder of Rekha Maker, a creative studio exploring form, materiality, and storytelling through handcrafted objects. Her architectural and artistic work inform one another, with projects exhibited at the V&A Dundee, London Design Festival, and Los Angeles, and commissions including the Scottish Album of the Year Award. Rekha is passionate about design as a tool for social impact and continues to combine practice, research, and craft to push the boundaries of how architecture and art intersect. Read more about Rekha here.

Scott Smith is a contemporary silversmith based at Deemouth Artist Studios, Aberdeen. His work combines traditional silversmithing techniques such as raising, planishing and chasing with a clean, contemporary design aesthetic. Drawing inspiration from Pictish stone carvings, Scotland’s landscapes and ancient metalwork, Scott creates functional yet sculptural silverware that explores connection, heritage, and ritual.

A QEST Emerging Maker Scholar and Visual Arts Scotland Trustee, he has exhibited widely across the UK and continues to advocate for Scottish silversmithing through mentoring, public engagement and new collections. www.scottsmith.design

GSA graduates can be found in a diverse range of careers and sectors. Your studies at The Glasgow School of Art support you in developing highly transferable skills and practices, such as problem-solving, project management, collaborating, innovation, and approaches to communicating ideas or telling stories. For this session, the Working Space team invites two graduates to share their creative careers journeys and how they have used their transferable skills to operate in different sectors successfully.

Guest speakers:
Sara Schlatte is the founder of SumStudio, Accountancy for Creatives. Offering accounting and bookkeeping services specifically catered towards professionals in the creative industries. Sara graduated from GSA in 2018. She dabbled in a few careers in her twenties.. none quite fit. After having a baby and reevaluating her priorities she decided to undertake an Accountancy course. While learning fundamental skills in managing money and taxes, she realised there was a distinct lack of discussion around money in her circles. Realising how valuable this knowledge is for the self-employed, she launched SumStudio to share it in a way that feels accessible, supportive, and tailored to creatives. www.sum-studio.co.uk

Additional Speaker to be announced soon.