Boldly Unemployed

Katerina Demetriou-Jones

From August to September I worked as a trainee at Bold Tendencies for 6 weeks. I applied for this position back in April this year, and it just so happened that as I sent a follow-up email about it, someone had dropped out, so I got a place! The Bold Tendencies site is very unique; situated on the top four floors of a multi-storey car park in Peckham, the views are very beautiful.
 
Having started the traineeship in August, it was much cooler outside and especially windy on the roof, I almost got blown away! After climbing what feels like 100 flights of stairs to get to the top of the car park, you would reach the pink lobby, featuring an installation piece by Arjuna Neuman. This was one of the areas to be invigilated by the trainees, as well as the kiosk on the roof (where we were based) just past the pink lobby. The rooftop needed to be swept every day before opening and cleared of any cups from Frank’s Café, along with the artworks needing to be cleaned, for example mirrors and installations dusted. On the lower level was another area with installations to be invigilated and to give information to visitors, as trainees we had to know all the information about every commission.
 
Overall, this experience helped me to become more confident with talking to visitors and understanding partly how an arts organisation works. Having not visited Peckham before, I got to know the area as extremely rich in culture and not taken over by a thousand Prets and Starbucks', which was refreshing to say the least. However, being in the third group of trainees this summer, which was mainly made up of White Europeans (including myself), and only one male with the rest female. It felt not representative of the local area Bold Tendencies is situated in, nor the different types of people who are interested in the arts. I'm not sure why this is, there could be many reasons - possibly based on the selection process or the types of people who feel they can apply or a bit of both. It is clear though that there is lots of work to be done in the art world to make it more representative.
 
Assignments were also a part of the traineeship, for example coming up with mood boards for next year’s theme, reading the book ‘The Order of Time’ as it was part of their closing event fitting with the theme for this year: Ecology. My most favourite part of the tasks to prep the site for visitors was tidying the Derek Jarman Garden on site, I think because it was so peaceful. As my final assignment at the end of the traineeship, I decided to do an illustration of the garden using my graphics tablet: re-creating a living thing by a digital means, keeping within the theme of ecology.

As it stands, I am still searching for internships two months later! I have my part-time job as a tutor at Explore Learning, so in the meantime I am creating lots of artwork in addition to applying for things every day.
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