As our first blogpost we thought it would be appropriate to begin with the person who brought us all together in the first place and who encouraged us to share work in a supportive environment. That person is Miranda Gavin who led the Trip-pod sessions that we all participated in in 2016. Today we are having a talk with Wendy Pye, whose idea it was to set up Tri-pod after completing an MA.
If any of you are in Brighton, come along at 2pm on Sat 6 October at Gallery Lock In, Little Western Street, Brighton.
Miranda (Gavin), what made you want to set it up and what are the key philosophies behind it?
The initial idea for Tri-pod came from co-founder Wendy Pye, who completed a MA in Photography at London College of Communication in 2009. During this time, she developed personal projects but found that, having left the course, she missed having regular, structured feedback. However, at times, she had also felt deflated by the quality of feedback and support that it provided. It was from this experience that she realised the importance of having a skilled facilitator involved, rather than a peer-to-peer led support group, and believed that I had the right qualities to facilitate such a group.
I am a qualified and experienced teacher in Further Education as well as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language and have seen and experienced very good teaching practices as well as appalling practices. I studied photography BA (Hons) in Film, Photography and Video (University of Westminster) which is were Wendy and I met; I produce my own image/text/performance work (albeit it under the radar and in specific contexts); and am a writer who has worked in the UK photo industry since 2004 which is when I first started writing for Hotshoe magazine.
Tri-pod’s key aim is to offer critical support, involving research and development, to photographers and visual artists working on lens-based personal projects in progress. Wendy and I felt that we could offer this support to emerging and established lens-based practitioners. From my experience looking at photographers/lens-based artists’ work and Wendy’s experience as a photographer showing work and studying in a formal educational setting, we found that there was a gap in the provision of ongoing support offered for the development of ideas in the context of a safe and supportive environment.
We researched a number of individuals and read books focused on encouraging creativity among artists and spent time after every session reflecting on what we could improve and develop. The emphasis is on inspiring each other, developing participants’ projects in progress, looking at ways to move it forward and encouraging the participants to keep in touch with each other outside of the workshop. There is a nurturing aspect to what we do; we are not scared of addressing personal issues surrounding projects, especially as they are all personally motivated projects. We also wanted to engage with how people feel on a psychological basis about their work and creativity; it’s about nurturing ideas and birthing projects.
Wendy acted as a key figure in the first group as she had a dual role as a participant of the group working on her own project as well as helping shape and organise the Tri-pod workshops. We also wanted to offer an alternative to the traditional Portfolio Review session format that many organisations and festivals offer when industry professionals look at and review bodies of work. Towards the end of our workshops, we invite industry professionals, including curators, gallerists, agents and editors, to give feedback to the participants in small groups alongside me.
The first Tri-pod group was set up in April 2010 and ran for eighteen months as a closed research and development group. The nine members were selected through an application process and the call for participants was sent out via alumni websites and social media channels. From the outset, we decided to charge a fee for the workshops as we did not seek funding and wanted to have a sustainable business model. As far as we know, when we started in 2010, we were the only initiative offering facilitated peer-to-peer support in this way. Now there are many more workshops of this kind, as well as peer-to-peer led mentoring. However, what we offer is specific as I facilitate all the sessions that we run as Tri-pod workshops.
2. Being stuck and how peer mentoring helps
Firstly, making a commitment to attending a group, such as Tri-pod, is one way to meet other people and to combat isolation, which can be a major hurdle for many creatives. This is especially so if someone also works freelance, and/or has other work commitments, a family and/or children to look after.
The extent to which peer mentoring helps will inevitably depend on the individuals making up the group and, where it is a facilitated group, the facilitators. Peer-to-peer mentoring allows participants to meet regularly, share ideas, set goals and receive supportive feedback from each other. However, Tri-pod is based on a facilitated peer-mentoring model, so I am always there for the group and not to make, or progress, my own work, which produces a different experience. Once someone has attended a Tri-pod workshop, they are part of the informal Tri-pod Network and are encouraged to set up on-going meetings to support each other outside the facilitated Tri-pod workshops.
Some of the groups have continued to meet and have set up peer-to-peer mentoring sessions, having initially participated in Tri-pod workshops. These include your group and the first group who continued to meet for another six months. Some people find that facilitated peer mentoring workshops are a stepping stone to establish peer-to-peer mentoring to further develop and produce final projects. This can really help to keep a project from being shelved once a facilitated group has finished as well as helping to maintain momentum and motivation with people who are already familiar with each other’s projects and practice.
3. How do you apply your teachings to your own practice?
I have two key factors to consider, which are different. One is my role as a facilitator supporting other people’s work, the other is as the creator of my own work. In Tri-pod my role is clear—it is about other people’s work, not my own. I try my best to give 100% focus and energy to each participant in the group with their research and development, on both practical and conceptual levels. When I am working on my own projects I try to ‘walk the talk’ and key to this is making time to do it. That’s one of the biggest challenges for me. There are many reasons that people don’t focus on personal projects and I am as fallible as anyone else and have used distraction as an excuse to not develop projects. I hear myself saying things such as, I don’t have the time, the money, the energy, the motivation, so I try to ask myself these questions too and find ways to address these obstacles (real or perceived).
I have lots of ideas but so many are never realised. However, I am an obsessive note taker and collect all types of material, so I make sure that I record and acknowledge them using notebooks, sketchbooks, even bits of paper that I then collate etc. My experience in journalism helps with this and research in general and, even if an idea is not relevant now, it may be in the future.
I also try to be kind to myself about my ideas and work, otherwise I become my own worst enemy and can be very self-critical. There are plenty of art institutions where lecturers pull apart people’s work to the extent that some people stop working on their ideas altogether, or hide their work/portfolio under their bed (as I did), when I finished university. If a student is so worried about marks and grades it can stymie creativity, produce projects that are not really about creative self-expression, but more about academic rigour, formulas, house styles, and ‘pleasing’ tutors.
The older I have got and the more I have seen, the better I have addressed my own lack of confidence with personal work and my fear of judgment that my work is not good enough, irrelevant, or too self indulgent. As all of my personal work is related to my own life and my own passions, it could be argued that there is a therapeutic aspect to it both in the process of its creation and in exhibiting work. The latter aspect is the one I find the most confronting, not least because once it’s out there, it’s public. Some people liken the dissemination of work to giving birth to a project, others to a funeral, a letting go, and a kind of death.
For my own work I have created a persona, The Handbag Projectionist, under which guise I create art works, using photography, text, and film. My work often explores gender relations and power dynamics in domestic contexts, in particular themes of abuse, betrayal, and love. The dissemination of the work, including the spaces in which the work is shown, is as integral to the concept of The Handbag Projectionist as the subject of the work. It’s about context as well as content. To this end, my previous works include:
- Home Discomforts, (2009), a group show at Novas Galley, Southwark, London:
Photo caption: Family photo of me and my photo of the corridor of the flat where I grew up in North-West London
- CRIB GIRL (aka Desert Rose), (2011-), an ongoing multi-media collaboration—using music, film and image composites—with US-based singer/songwriter/artist, Johnette Napolitano:
- Fractured Self, (2014), a fly-poster campaign, which was part of the temps guerrilla street art show focusing on women and mental health:
- I'm in a Thrupple, (2016-), a series of toy tableaux commenting on a 21st-century love triangle, which I originally posted on Facebook and from where I have collated comments:
Comment on Facebook: No snoring, no farting, no stealing the covers. Perfect x
- CUT/SLICE, (2017, video 12mins), an art performance and video:
This performance took place and was filmed as part of a fundraiser for the Penny Beale Memorial Fund, a charity that was set up to combat domestic violence. I also performed the piece at the PV of HATCHED 18, a creative platform set up by artist and curator Maga Esberg in 2015 to develop, make and promote art addressing private and public female experiences. This year’s exhibition was held at The Jam Factory as part of the Oxford International Women’s Festival and International Women’s Day 2018.
All of these art works can be seen as a form of social activism driven by a desire to stand up and be counted as a feminist, and to raise awareness of taboo and 'sensitive subjects', as well as to create opportunities for dialogue. These works will be housed on my own website, Outside Her Art, which is currently under construction and will be launched at the end of this year.
The success or not—whatever success means to someone—of a project is often a matter of taste, timing, networking with ‘key’ influencers, and being under the radar of those who can promote projects. Sometimes, this can be about ‘cosying’ up to the right people and becoming part of their inner circle. Often this becomes more about the personality of the creator than the actual project and that is something I struggle with as it can be so arbitrary, confusing and downright exclusive.
4. Are there any peer mentoring rules or codes of conduct that you would suggest? For example, we noticed that there were no stipulations or qualifications required for joining Tri-pod which leads to an inclusive and non-elitist group who are simply together with the aim of support rather than judgement.
We keep the Tri-pod groups small. So far, we have run workshops with between six to 12 participants (no more), all of who are new to Tri-pod. We have run a range of workshop formats from monthly groups held over six months who then continued to meet for a further six months (London 2010 and Brighton 2014); one-day and weekend workshops at the Roof Unit in Bethnal Green, London and at Photofusion in Brixton, London.
More recently, I facilitated three groups, who met fortnightly over three months, at Photofusion (2016-17). Photofusion has been very supportive of Tri-pod, particularly Kim Shaw, Executive Director at Photofusion, who is a photographer herself, and Christiane Monarchi, Chair of the Board at Photofusion and Founding Editor of the online photography magazine, Photomonitor.
In order to be as inclusive as possible, we have kept the Tri-pod model flexible in terms of duration and number of meetings, as well with regard to the fee we charge each participant, which is often skewed towards the minimum cost at which we can afford to run the workshops. In terms of prior qualifications, we have run workshops that require participants to have previously studied at BA or MA level and to submit a proposal, as well as ones where there are no ‘entry’ requirements. Many Tri-pod participants have, and are, working as professional photographers. This has meant that participants, who have not attended university but still really want to develop a personal project (not just commissioned briefs), can still participate. Whether they have attended university, or not, is often irrelevant, and shouldn’t be a barrier to being able to take part.
The first part of the workshop is always focused on bringing the group together and setting ground rules so that we can provide a safe space in which participants can reflect on their creative practice, such as how they develop and nurture ideas, as well as providing opportunities to discuss the impact of feedback on their practice. This has proved to be a robust and successful first stage as it engenders, we hope, the right environment for the expression and development of ideas. It is vital to have clear time limits for discussing participants’ work as well as sticking to start and finish times.
We always say that what is shared in the sessions, stays in the session. Some participants may be working on very personal projects, and one of my roles is to nurture ideas without judgement and without participants worrying about marks or grades—that kind of format is for formal higher education. With Tri-pod, we wanted to create an alternative to this kind of educational hierarchy and the competitiveness it can and does produce.
In our experience, the facilitators who we invite to give feedback need to understand the way we work and the Tri-pod ethos. It is not about point scoring, or giving feedback that may, in its delivery, cripple someone else’s ability to develop ideas. I am a great supporter of working outside rigid structures and believe that creative and artistic practice can happen anywhere and in many different ways. I have worked in the UK photo industry as a writer/journalist; have done many portfolio reviews for festivals and photo organisations; chaired talks and given guest lectures at universities and creative institutions, so I can also offer industry insights.
5. Is there a finite life to peer mentoring groups? We feel our group still has an energy that gives positive results but it would be interesting to hear your opinion on how to increase the longevity of a group.
That depends on the group. I believe that there needs to be a commitment to the group, such as being reliable, turning up and actively participating. I do think it helps to have an end goal of some description, particularly if a group is peer-to-peer led, such as putting on an exhibition or a publication. Tri-pod’s first exhibition, Nine Point Perspective: Ways of Seeing, was held at Hotshoe Gallery in 2010 and its second, INSIDE OUT, at Photofusion in 2013—something tangible that can bring participants and their work together towards a common goal. However, this also brings its own challenges as people move from idea and realisation of ideas in a private space, to making work public with all that entails. Practical, conceptual and interpersonal skills can also be developed at these stages.
It helps to bring in fresh, outside perspectives, if you can. However, the people who are invited need to be supportive, experienced, and in my view, able to work outside traditional academic art school rules of engagement. We are fortunate to have support from some amazing people, including the late Sue Steward (writer/curator/broadcaster) and Laura Noble (gallerist/writer/mentor/artist). Laura continues to bring her extensive knowledge and insights to projects and both Sue and Laura were, and are, part of the Tri-pod ‘family’.
Further links
Nine-Point Perspective: Ways of Seeing (2010), a group exhibition at Hotshoe Gallery in London:
Installing the work
Installing the work
IS THAT IT (2012), a Tri-pod group exhibition held as part of the Brighton Photo Fringe at the Phoenix Gallery in Brighton:
The Fringe 2012
The Fringe 2012
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