The aim of LifeWorkArt is to help students make the transition from a Fine Art course to a career in the cultural sector. The project takes on board that many students are likely to be self-employed entrepreneurs and freelancers with increasing numbers hoping to remain in the region.
LifeWorkArt Workshops
You’ll find information and links here to LWA workshops. The live sessions for these are usually aimed at particular year groups and you will have been emailed sign up details. So check on that. But the material (videos, pdf etc) is there for anyone to look at who wants to do that
LifeWorkArt Skills Week 2025: October 27,28,29,30,31
This is an exciting full week of foundational and advanced professional practice workshops and artists’ talks You can sign up for up to 3 workshops. You obviously need to go to the right room for your workshop and we’ve allowed a gap between workshops so you can get from one space to another.
If you have any material you want advice on (eg you are writing a press release or a proposal, if you have an artist’s statement, a blog, an Instagram profile etc and want feedback) then bring that material along with you as a printout, on a laptop, tablet etc.
Also DON’T FORGET a notebook and a pen!!
Stage 1&2
Tuesday 28th October
AMSTRONG BUILDING ARMB.1.06
Promoting yourself
3-4pm Tara Alesandratos: How to promote your artwork, create a brand and continue to make meaningful connections beyond university.
Tara Alisandratos is a fine art photographer, parent carer and advocate based in North East of England. A graduate of Napier and Sunderland Universities, she has been teaching photography workshops in Newcastle and Sunderland for over 15 years. Her work is autobiographical and highly personal, investigating themes of memory, trauma and, most recently, mothering a disabled child and navigating the ableist system that is meant to support them.
LIFE ROOM
Where does the money come from?
12-1pm Petra Szeman: “but what does an artist actually do for work, what do you get paid for, where can the money come from, how can a “career” unfold”. A post-university artist life information and skills talk.
LIFE ROOM
The profession of Art Therapy
2-3pm Fiona Fitzpatrick: An introduction to freelance art therapy, highlighting therapeutic work with adopted children and adults in community-based settings.
LIFE ROOM
Careers and Employability
3-4pm Mike Burns & Ellie Clark: The Careers services can support fine art students by providing workshops on career planning, offering one-on-one advice, helping with applications and interviews, assisting with building professional skills like networking and using LinkedIn.
HENRY DAYSH BUILDING ROOM 1.07
Working in Arts Development
10-11am Alia Gargum: Join artist, curator and educator Alia Gargum for a talk and Q&A on her career since graduating from Newcastle and her role as Art Development Officer at The Dead Dog Gallery.
Alia Gargum is a British-Libyan sculpture and installation artist based in Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK. She composes her work through critical and personal exploration of politics and culture, focusing on her heritage through diasporic means.
Recent exhibitions include: ḵawwāfa / خَوَّافَة at 36 Lime Street in her first solo show, Newcastle
Upon Tyne, 2025 and as part of Middlesbrough Art Week, Middlesbrough, 2024.
Wednesday 29th October
NCA, Highbridge Works, 39 Highbridge, NE1 1EW
Developing Creative Workshops for Schools in Galleries
1.30 to 2:30pm (arrive 10 mins early for hot drinks)
Neil Bromwich Gain hands-on LWA skills working with artists Walker & Bromwich at NCA Gallery, developing workshop materials for school groups exploring climate issues. The project focuses on the lost Lort Burn, a ghost river beneath Newcastle city centre.
“Listening to the Voices of the Rivers” connects Amazonian Indigenous philosophies with North East England river initiatives, featuring eleven Latin American artists. Walker & Bromwich’s complementary work reawakens connections to the hidden Lort Burn beneath High Bridge. Through primary and secondary school engagement, the project reimagines this lost river, bringing it into public consciousness while exploring our relationship with water as a living, life-giving force.
Students will gain experience making wearable art for performance and practice lesson planning
LIFE ROOM
Photographing your artwork.
10-12noon : Tara Alesandratos: Photographing artwork: this session covers all aspects of being able to photograph your artwork within the studio setting. We will use basic lighting techniques and framing to help you get the best shots of your work. Please come prepared with charged phones or photographic equipment borrowed from Mick, selfie lights are also useful. Bring laptops if you would like some help with manipulating imagery after shooting on programs like Photoshop and Lightroom.
Henry Daysh Building HDB.1.13
10-11am Briony Carlin: Make an exhibition in an hour
Group exhibitions can provide valuable opportunities for early career artists. This rapid workshop will give you ideas about how to initiate a group show with limited time and resources, and some practical tips do’s and don’ts about working with other artists, technicians and environments, and how to convert it into a real proposal and make it happen.
Preparation: bring a printout picture of an artwork you would like to include in the workshop’s ‘exhibition’ and think of three words that relate to it.
HATTON GALLERY LEARNING SPACE
2-3pm Theresa Easton delivers a workshop introducing best practice in running workshops.
Thursday 30th October
LIFE ROOM
Documenting your artwork.
10-1pm : Tara Alesandratos: Photographing artwork: this session covers all aspects of being able to photograph your artwork within the studio setting. We will use basic lighting techniques and framing to help you get the best shots of your work. Please come prepared with charged phones or photographic equipment borrowed from Mick, selfie lights are also useful. Bring laptops if you would like some help with manipulating imagery after shooting on programs like Photoshop and Lightroom.
ROOM 1.16
The CRASH ARS course. How to set-up artist studios.
12-1pm This workshop was developed by ARS studio founders Hannah Christy, Sabina Sallis, and Maya Wallis. This will be a condensed, interactive, playful and informative exploration of the basic facts and skills for setting up artist studios.
Hannah Christy is an artist and curator interested in spaces and contexts which facilitate shared experience, be that conceptual, social or bodily. Her work uses photography, installation and text to communicate sensation and feeling. Alongside running Albion Row studios, she is the Assistant Curator at the Farrell Centre, developing the public programme.
Sabina Sallis is an artist, researcher and educator with an expanded practice that unfolds in an improvised manner as propositions and a creative methodology built upon a reciprocity between land practice and art practice. This maps worlds and spaces of possibilities, and can take the form of performances, workshops, retreats, foraging walks, videos, drawings, gardens, meals, objects and installations. Co-creating the Albion Row Studios is yet another way to exercise and practice this unfolding,
Maya Wallis is a practicing artist and arts worker. She works as the Bookshop and Reading Room Coordinator at The NewBridge Project where she focuses her programming on knowledge sharing, art writing and collaborative reading practices. At ARS she looks after the finances as well as contributing to wider collaborative tasks.
SEMINAR ROOM
Defence against the Fine Arts
2-3pm Jed Buttress: This workshop will provide you with skills, tips and methods to survive in the ‘Fine Art world’ – as an independent creator and as part of an organisation. Arm yourself with a wealth of free resources and inside knowledge to find opportunities, find work, and find creative communities that you thrive in.
Jed Buttress is an award-winning artist and curator based in Newcastle upon Tyne. He has curated over one hundred exhibitions, independently and with organisations such as NOPHOTO, The Royal Photographic Society and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Mitochondrial Research. Buttress is the curator and producer for Brass Tacks, an artist skills development project funded by Creative Central: NCL, which spawned two critically-acclaimed exhibitions: In the Round (September 2023) and Counterweight (January 2024).
Other recent curated exhibitions include the Documentary Photographer of the Year 2021: Touring Exhibition (May 2022), Liz Atkin: Drawings, Collage and Writing – A Retrospective (June 2022), SEEKING ARMAGEDDON by Peter Hanmer (October 2022).
Friday 31st October
FINE ART LECTURE THEATRE
Artist Statement Writing
10-11am Dan Goodman: Artist Statement Writing:How to do it and what to include and why.
Dan Goodman is an artist-curator and researcher whose practice explores the social world of art and what it means to be part of it. This is centred around their lived experience of running a Newcastle-based artist-run gallery, System. They use System as a test site to explore different ways of being and working together through performance, karaoke, storytelling, and exhibition-making. Goodman is interested in the overlap between ideas of emotional value, the social, and the spatial within artist communities. Their ongoing practice-based PhD explores how reactivity and informality can be prime drivers in fostering identity-making and community building.
FINE ART LECTURE THEATRE
Working Cross-Discipline All Stages2-3pm Dr Olivia Turner This workshop will explore, through a creative-practice led approach, what is means to work across different disciplines, how to do this in a university setting, practical strategies for interdisciplinary collaboration, identifying potential collaborators and types of institutional support, and building a working agreement.
Stage 3 & 4 & MA
Wednesday 29th October
Henry Daysh Building HDB.1.13
Thinking of Curating?
11-12am Briony Carlin: Make an exhibition in an hour
Group exhibitions can provide valuable opportunities for early career artists. This rapid workshop will give you ideas about how to initiate a group show with limited time and resources, and some practical tips do’s and don’ts about working with other artists, technicians and environments, and how to convert it into a real proposal and make it happen.
Preparation: bring a printout picture of an artwork you would like to include in the workshop’s ‘exhibition’ and think of three words that relate to it.
SEMINAR ROOM
Teaching Art & Design
2-3pm Vega Brennan delivers an interactive workshop on training in Secondary PGCE Art and Design (teacher training). This session will help you decide if teaching in schools is the right career for you, how to prepare for your PGCE year and what working in schools is like.
Vega is an Initial Teacher Education lecturer, specialising in Art and Design (Secondary). (This session will not be recorded.)
LIFE ROOM
Documenting your artwork.
2-5pm: Tara Alesandratos: Photographing artwork: this session covers all aspects of being able to photograph your artwork within the studio setting. We will use basic lighting techniques and framing to help you get the best shots of your work. Please come prepared with charged phones or photographic equipment borrowed from Mick, selfie lights are also useful. Bring laptops if you would like some help with manipulating imagery after shooting on programs like Photoshop and Lightroom.
Thursday 30th October
NCA, Highbridge Works, 39 Highbridge, NE1 1EW
Developing Creative Workshops for Schools in Galleries
10 to 11:30am (arrive 10 mins early for hot drinks)
Neil Bromwich ‘Listening to the Voice of Rivers’.
Gain hands-on LWA skills working with artists Walker & Bromwich at NCA Gallery, developing workshop materials for school groups exploring climate issues. The project focuses on the lost Lort Burn, a ghost river beneath Newcastle city centre.
“Listening to the Voices of the Rivers” connects Amazonian Indigenous philosophies with North East England river initiatives, featuring eleven Latin American artists. Walker & Bromwich’s complementary work reawakens connections to the hidden Lort Burn beneath High Bridge. Through primary and secondary school engagement, the project reimagines this lost river, bringing it into public consciousness while exploring our relationship with water as a living, life-giving force.
LIFE ROOM
Documenting your artwork.
2-5pm: Tara Alesandratos: Photographing artwork: this session covers all aspects of being able to photograph your artwork within the studio setting. We will use basic lighting techniques and framing to help you get the best shots of your work. Please come prepared with charged phones or photographic equipment borrowed from Mick, selfie lights are also useful. Bring laptops if you would like some help with manipulating imagery after shooting on programs like Photoshop and Lightroom.
SEMINAR ROOM
Where does the money come from?
10-11am Petra Szeman: “but what does an artist actually do for work, what do you get paid for, where can the money come from, how can a “career” unfold”. A post-university artist life information and skills talk.
ROOM 1.16
The CRASH ARS course. How to set-up artist studios.
10-11am This workshop was developed by ARS studio founders Hannah Christy, Sabina Sallis, and Maya Wallis. This will be a condensed, interactive, playful and informative exploration of the basic facts and skills for setting up artist studios.
FINE ART LECTURE THEATRE
Setting up a gallery
12-1pm Matt Antoniak: Co-director of Slugtown, Matt Antoniak, will talk you through the ins and outs of setting up and running an art gallery, and how you can do it too.
FINE ART LECTURE THEATRE
Working in Art Therapy
2-3pm Megan Keane: An introduction to the profession of art therapy, including qualifying, areas of work and a day in the life of an art therapist.
SEMINAR ROOM
Defence against the Fine Arts
3-4pm Jed Buttress: This workshop will provide you with skills, tips and methods to survive in the ‘Fine Art world’ – as an independent creator and as part of an organisation. Arm yourself with a wealth of free resources and inside knowledge to find opportunities, find work, and find creative communities that you thrive in.
Jed Buttress is an award-winning artist and curator based in Newcastle upon Tyne. He has curated over one hundred exhibitions, independently and with organisations such as NOPHOTO, The Royal Photographic Society and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Mitochondrial Research. Buttress is the curator and producer for Brass Tacks, an artist skills development project funded by Creative Central: NCL, which spawned two critically-acclaimed exhibitions: In the Round (September 2023) and Counterweight (January 2024).
Friday 31st October Stage
LIFE ROOM
Map Your Routes to Market
10-11.30am –Work in groups to brainstorm and chart practical ways different types of artists can get their work out into the world – from fairs to brand collaborations. Leave with your own ‘go-to-market’ strategy
Rebecca Innes & Mike Burns: The Careers services can support fine art students by providing workshops on career planning, offering one-on-one advice, helping with applications and interviews, assisting with building professional skills like networking and using LinkedIn.
Rebecca Innes is a Start-up Adviser at Newcastle University and also runs Beth’s Cat Rescue, a small cat rescue charity local to Northumberland and North Tyneside. Since graduating with an MA in Creative Writing and BA (Hons) in Media Production from Northumbria University, she has always held a portfolio career. She has 14 years’ experience as a freelance multi-disciplinary creative (from screenwriting and copywriting to graphic design and illustration) alongside various employed roles, primarily within Marketing and Education. As part of her career, she has been an Associate Lecturer at Northumbria University and part of the Senior Leadership team of a start-up/scale-up. As Start-up Adviser, she coaches students and graduates with new business ideas and designs and delivers workshops to stimulate entrepreneurial intent across learning and teaching programmes.
FINE ART LECTURE THEATRE
Artist Statement Writing
11-12noon Dan Goodman: Artist Statement Writing:How to do it and what to include and why.
Dan Goodman is an artist-curator and researcher whose practice explores the social world of art and what it means to be part of it. This is centred around their lived experience of running a Newcastle-based artist-run gallery, System. They use System as a test site to explore different ways of being and working together through performance, karaoke, storytelling, and exhibition-making. Goodman is interested in the overlap between ideas of emotional value, the social, and the spatial within artist communities. Their ongoing practice-based PhD explores how reactivity and informality can be prime drivers in fostering identity-making and community
building.
FINE ART LECTURE THEATRE
Freddy Williams
12-1pm
Working for an artist and working in an artist studio
LIFE ROOM (LIMIT 20 STUDENTS)
The Practicalities of Hustling
12-1pm Kitty McKay – Jack of many trades, not yet the master of any: transdisciplinarity in art practice and beyond. This workshop involves walking, please contact Theresa.easton@ncl.ac.uk if you require further information
Kitty McKay is an artist, but they are also an arts worker, a producer, a sort of researcher, a social practitioner, a DJ, a hospitality worker and a recent Newcastle MFA graduate. In this workshop, Kitty will talk about their approach to transdisciplinarity; they will touch on some of the grimmer practicalities of hustling, but they will also encourage participants to celebrate the joy and creativity involved in being a jack of many art-related trades.
What might first appear to be a massive brag about having lots of different skills will quickly reveal itself to be a necessary means to surviving the often precarious conditions of life, work and art. They will ask participants to reflect on their own different interlocking, overlapping and potentially unrelated skills, in an attempt to rethink and reassign value to the different kinds of labour we do in the orbit of art.
FINE ART LECTURE THEATRE
Working Cross-Discipline All Stages
2-3pm Dr Olivia Turner This workshop will explore, through a creative-practice led approach, what is means to work across different disciplines, how to do this in a university setting, practical strategies for interdisciplinary collaboration, identifying potential collaborators and types of institutional support, and building a working agreement.
FINE ART LECTURE THEATRE
Promoting yourself
3-4pm Tara Alesandratos:
How to promote your artwork, create a brand and continue to make meaningful connections beyond university.
Tara Alisandratos is a fine art photographer, parent carer and advocate based in North East of England. A graduate of Napier and Sunderland Universities, she has been teaching photography workshops in Newcastle and Sunderland for over 15 years. Her work is autobiographical and highly personal, investigating themes of memory, trauma and, most recently, mothering a disabled child and navigating the ableist system that is meant to support them.
SEMINAR ROOM
Working with Collections and Archives
3-4pm Dr Olivia Turner will explore ways of working in collections and archives. We will consider how archives shape cultural memory and identity, and reflect on ethical and practical questions that may arise when working with historical and institutional collections and archives. We will explore approaches to curating, interpreting, or responding to materials in collections and archives.
HATTON GALLERY LEARNING SPACE
2-3pm Theresa Easton delivers a workshop introducing best practice in running workshops, covering professional requirements, accessibility and H&S.
ARCHIVE
LWA Professional Practice Conference 2024
Thursday, 7 November 2024
LWA Professional Practice Conference
Thurs 9 Nov 2023
10am-5pm
Venue Fine Art Department
This is full day of professional practice workshops and artists’ talks available to Yr4 and Yr3 BA and to MFA students. You can sign up for four workshops. You obviously need to go to the right room for your workshop and we’ve allowed a gap between workshops so you can get from one space to another.
If you have any material you want advice on (eg you are writing a press release or a proposal, if you have an artist’s statement, a blog, an Instagram profile etc and want feedback) then bring that material along with you as a printout, on a laptop, tablet etc.
Also DON’T FORGET a notebook and a pen!!
Signing up sheets are on the noticeboard opposite the reception desk.
When signing up please PRINT your name in BLOCK CAPITALS.
To see the complete program, please click here
Programme
Download the 2023 programme here.
Archive:
LWA Professional Practice Conference, Nov 2021
Thurs 11 Nov 2021 10am-5pm
Venue Fine Art Department
| Lecture Theatre | Seminar Room | Life Room | Meeting Room behind reception | |
| 10.00-11.00 | IntroPresentations by recent grads Jed Buttress, Susie Davies, Petra Szeman | |||
| 11.15-12.15Workshop 1 | Creativity & Resilience Catherine Bertola | From Painter to Filmmaker Susie Davies | How To Get Away With Graduating Jed Buttress | |
| 12.15-1.15Lunch Break | ||||
| 1.15-2.15Workshop 2 | Writing Proposals & Applications Catriona Gallagher | Working Freelance Steve Bowden & Gretel DixonStart Up | Developing Your Practice After Graduation Petra Szeman | |
| 2.30-3.30Workshop 3 | CV and Planning Ailsa McLeod Careers | Realising the extent and impact of your workPip Kyle | Artists StatementsDan Goodman | In The Briefing RoomHot Desque |
| 3.45-4.45Workshop 4 | About Curation Jenny McNamara | Can Art be taught?Carly Frame | Self Promotion Tara Stewart | In The Briefing RoomHot Desque |
| 5.00 SocialArt Cafe | Screenings |
LWA Projects 2020-21
LWA Mini Conference
Fri 5 March 2021, 2pm
LWA Mini Conference
Four recent graduates are joining us on Fri 5 March for presentations and a panel discussion. They will talk about their time at Newcastle, what they have been doing since graduation (including how Covid has affected them), and plans for the future.
You will find video presentations and interviews from Hannah, Pelumi, Matt and Stella below.
Take a look at the presentations before the Panel Discussion. This gives you the opportunity to email any questions to me (david.butler@ncl.ac.uk) before the panel discussion – but you can also ask questions during the live session.
Hannah Christy
Hannah Christy who graduated last year (so like you was studying under Covid restrictions). She is part of the Collective Studio at NewBridge and has set up a gallery rePUBlic working with an architect’s practice in Blythe.
MATTHEW PICKERING
Matthew Pickering graduated in 2015. He practises as an artist (based at NewBridge) with a focus around living with Alzheimers; applying for commissions and fundraising for his own projects. He also works as Project Manager with D6 Culture in Transit.
Stella Dixon
Stella Dixon who graduated in 2018. Immediately after graduation she did a traineeship in documentary filmmaking with OTOXO Productions in Barcelona. Since then she has been based in Newcastle working as a freelance filmmaker. She was commissioned by New Creatives North to make a short film, Born To Flex now showing as a part of ‘Female Filmmakers: BBC Introducing Arts’.
PELUMI ODUBANJO
Pelumi Odubanjo who graduated in 2019. She did the MA Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths immediately after graduation (so was also studying under Covid) and has been working as an independent curator and writer both while studying at Goldsmiths and since finishing her MA; for example as Curator in Residence at the Black Cutural Archives.
Video Presentations
Matthew Pickering
Find further info here .
HANNAH CHRISTY
Find further info here .
STELLA DIXON
Find further info here .
PELUMI ODUBANJO
Find further info here .
Being Resilient: Planning and Management
Being resilient: Planning and managing your time
LWA Professional Practice Workshop
Weds 28 October,
10-11am (inc Q&A)
Catherine Bertola
Additional Material:
Documenting Artwork
Documenting Artwork Workshop
8 and 18 Oct 2021
Tara Stewart
Interim Prep: Curating and Exhibiting
Online Workshop: Curating and exhibiting: making work public
WEDS 9 Dec 2020, 10 AM
Dr Emma Coffield and Gayle Meikle
1hr session
This session will give you a short introduction to exhibition-making practices, basic curatorial concepts alongside more expanded ways of working. We will try our best to provide feedback to any questions or concerns you have about this area of working so please bring along any thoughts you may have.
Websites and Blogs
Web presence workshop 2020/21
Workshop 1
Thurs 26 Nov 2020, 9.30 to 12. 30 Workshop 2
Thurs 26 Nov 2020 1.30 to 4.30
Workshop 3
Fri 27 Nov 2020: 9.30 to 12. 30
Workshop 4
Fri 27 Nov 1.30-4.30pm
Andy Sheridan
Videos
Video 1
Session 1: Introduction to WordPress
Andy Sheridan
Video 2
Session 2: Installing WordPress
Andy Sheridan
Video 3
Session 3: Settings and Media Library
Andy Sheridan
Video 4
Session 4: WordPress themes
Andy Sheridan
Video 5
Session 5: Adding a page
Andy Sheridan
Video 6
Session 6: Page setting and adding a spacer between content.
Andy Sheridan
Video 7
Session 7: Adding a Portfolio
Andy Sheridan
Video 8
Session 8: Adding a contact page and c.v.
Andy Sheridan
Video 9
Session 9: Editing an image in WordPress
Andy Sheridan
Video 10
Session 10: Links and WordPress Widgets
Andy Sheridan