Extraordinary Creatives

The art that stays with you isn't the art that pleases you. It's the art that names the thing stuck at the back of your throat — the one you couldn't quite say out loud — and then makes it real.

That's Lucia Pietroiusti. Curator of the Golden Lion-winning Sun & Sea, Head of Research & Emergence at the new Hartwig Museum in Amsterdam and Curator of The 2027 Autostrada Biennale.

In this conversation, we get into why the works that last speak to the body before the mind, and what it really takes to hold space for art that risks making people uncomfortable. We talk about ideas behaving like people, about institutions learning to hold a piece of an artist's life rather than commissioning a piece of their work, and about being tethered and free at the same time.

I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

KEY TAKEAWAYS


The artworks that stay with us often bypass explanation. They reach "something stuck at the back of your throat" before the intellect catches up, reminding us that feeling can be a form of knowledge.


Meaning isn't delivered by the artist and received by the audience. It emerges in the space between them. The work offers coordinates, not conclusions - people find their own way through.


Art creates meaning, connection, and transformation in ways that go beyond language. The most powerful art isn't the art that explains the world. It creates the conditions for people to feel, experience, and discover something they couldn't quite access before.


Trust intuition, trust audiences, trust long-term relationships, and trust that meaningful work often emerges from uncertainty rather than certainty.

BEST MOMENTS

"An artwork that stands the test of time is one that speaks not to your mind, but to something that's stuck at the back of your throat. And in a sense allows you to release that."

“There´s the sort of belly register - the heart, the body register, then there's the brain register, all of it working together…you're not over-emphasizing that it has to be understood intellectually first.”

“Ideas behave like people - they need rooms to move through, and time to become whatever they are going to become.”

EPISODE RESOURCES

https://www.instagram.com/luciapietroiusti_/

https://luciapietroiusti.earth/

PODCAST HOST BIO

With over 35 years in the art world, Ceri has worked closely with leading artists and arts professionals, managed public and private galleries and charities, and curated more than 250 exhibitions and events. She has sold artworks to major museums and private collectors and commissioned thousands of works across diverse media, from renowned artists such as John Akomfrah, Pipilotti Rist, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Vito Acconci. Now, she wants to share her extensive knowledge with you, so you can excel and achieve your goals.

****

Ceri Hand Coaching Membership: Group coaching, live art surgeries, exclusive masterclasses, portfolio reviews, weekly challenges. Access our library of content and resource hub anytime and enjoy special discounts within a vibrant community of peers and professionals. Ready to transform your art career? Join today!

https://cerihand.com/membership/

****

Unlock Your Artworld Network Self Study Course

Our self-study video course, "Unlock Your Artworld Network," offers a straightforward 5-step framework to help you build valuable relationships effortlessly. Gain the tools and confidence you need to create new opportunities and thrive in the art world today.

https://cerihand.com/courses/unlock_your_artworld_network/

****

Book a Discovery Call Today

To schedule a personalised 1-2-1 coaching session with Ceri or explore our group coaching options, simply email us at hello@cerihand.com

****

Discover Your Extraordinary Creativity

Visit www.cerihand.com to learn how we can help you become an extraordinary creative.

This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/

This episode is part of a nine-part series on commissions. How to prepare for them, respond to them, deliver them, and, crucially, how to stop them burning you out. If you haven't followed the podcast yet, hit follow so you don't miss an episode.

Today, episode 5 of 9 - If you only listen to one, I would ask that it be this one.

Because I am going to tell you about the single biggest shift most artists can make in how they run commissions. It changes the economics. It changes the relationship. It changes how the client sees you. And it is still, astonishingly, the thing nearly every artist is not yet doing.

It is called paid concept development.

So, last week's episode. The enquiry filter told you this client was serious. The chemistry call confirmed they were a good fit. The alignment document came back confirmed, with minor amendments. The client is now saying, brilliant, love it, let's go.

This is where most artists collapse. They work for free.

Sometimes 5 hours. Sometimes 10. Sometimes, on larger commissions, 30 or 40 hours of unpaid concept work before a single £ is on the table.

This is the shape of how artists lose weeks of unpaid labour every year. And most do not realise it is happening, because the work feels like normal commission behaviour. But it isn't. It is something an industry has normalised that is quietly killing its own practitioners.

There is another way.

KEY TAKEAWAYS


Every industry where bespoke work is produced charges for concept work -architects, designers etc. It simply means the client is paying upfront for your thinking: visuals, materials, research, concept rationale, scale considerations. They keep that work whether or not they proceed.


Paid concept development filters out the clients who were never going to commission anyway - before you've spent hours working for them.


Once your proposal is accepted, move to a second, separate production agreement: final fee, a 50% deposit with a 30/20% payment schedule, named dates, fabrication details, and written responsibilities. No ambiguity, no loose ends.

BEST MOMENTS

"It's something an industry has normalised that is quietly killing its own practitioners."

"You're not asking for something unusual, you're matching professional standards."

"The 50% deposit is not optional. If a client pushes back on the deposit, that's information.”

HOST BIO

With over 35 years in the art world, Ceri has worked closely with leading artists and arts professionals, managed public and private galleries and charities, and curated more than 250 exhibitions and events. She has sold artworks to major museums and private collectors and commissioned thousands of works across diverse media, from renowned artists such as John Akomfrah, Pipilotti Rist, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Vito Acconci. Now, she wants to share her extensive knowledge with you, so you can excel and achieve your goals.

**

Ceri Hand Coaching Membership: Group coaching, live art surgeries, exclusive masterclasses, portfolio reviews, weekly challenges. Access our library of content and resource hub anytime and enjoy special discounts within a vibrant community of peers and professionals. Ready to transform your art career? Join today!

https://cerihand.com/membership/

**

Unlock Your Artworld Network Self Study Course

Our self-study video course, "Unlock Your Artworld Network," offers a straightforward 5-step framework to help you build valuable relationships effortlessly. Gain the tools and confidence you need to create new opportunities and thrive in the art world today.

https://cerihand.com/courses/unlock_your_artworld_network/

**

Book a Discovery Call Today

To schedule a personalised 1-2-1 coaching session with Ceri or explore our group coaching options, simply email us at hello@cerihand.com

**

Discover Your Extraordinary Creativity

Visit www.cerihand.com to learn how we can help you become an extraordinary creative.

This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/

Amartey Golding makes chainmail sculptures that are seductive, threatening, funny, and deeply unsettling all at once. And in this conversation, he explains why discomfort might be one of the most important tools an artist has. Raised between London, Ghana, Rastafarian culture, council estates, and rural England, Amartey speaks with rare honesty about growing up between identities and how that tension became the emotional engine of his work.

In this conversation, you’ll hear how he learned to trust discomfort as part of his creative language, why audience feedback became essential to sharpening his voice, and how he creates installations that work not just intellectually, but viscerally — through sound, light, atmosphere, scale, and the body itself.

We talk about the emotional labour behind ambitious projects, the crash that can come after making large-scale work, and why sustainability, family life, and building a nourishing environment now matter as much to him as artistic ambition.

But perhaps most importantly, this episode offers a powerful lesson in how to develop your own artistic voice: not by trying to become someone else, but by listening more deeply to the contradictions, histories, and instincts already living inside you.

This one is rich, layered, funny, tender, and deeply human. I can’t wait for you to hear it.

KEY TAKEAWAYS


Belonging is not always about finding where we fit, but about reshaping inherited stories until they can accommodate more of who we are. Sometimes our work becomes a way of making room for identities that existing symbols struggle to contain.


There are moments in a creative life when continuing to succeed at one thing becomes a barrier to discovering another. Growth often asks us to leave behind what is proven, visible and commercially rewarded.


We romanticise the artist who creates through suffering. But, when people have enough security to be curious, playful, and fully present, they gain access to forms of imagination that survival alone cannot sustain.

BEST MOMENTS

“Extraordinary work rarely comes from pretending to have everything figured out. It comes from staying in relationship with the complexity. Staying curious enough to keep listening to your own voice as it shifts and evolves.”

“For me, it's all about the visceral... it's all about the belly, making stuff from the belly.”

EPISODE RESOURCES

http://amarteygolding.com/

https://www.instagram.com/amarteygolding

HOST BIO

With over 35 years in the art world, Ceri has worked closely with leading artists and arts professionals, managed public and private galleries and charities, and curated more than 250 exhibitions and events. She has sold artworks to major museums and private collectors and commissioned thousands of works across diverse media, from renowned artists such as John Akomfrah, Pipilotti Rist, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Vito Acconci. Now, she wants to share her extensive knowledge with you, so you can excel and achieve your goals.

**

Ceri Hand Coaching Membership: Group coaching, live art surgeries, exclusive masterclasses, portfolio reviews, weekly challenges. Access our library of content and resource hub anytime and enjoy special discounts within a vibrant community of peers and professionals. Ready to transform your art career? Join today!

https://cerihand.com/membership/

**

Unlock Your Artworld Network Self Study Course

Our self-study video course, "Unlock Your Artworld Network," offers a straightforward 5-step framework to help you build valuable relationships effortlessly. Gain the tools and confidence you need to create new opportunities and thrive in the art world today.

https://cerihand.com/courses/unlock_your_artworld_network/

**

Book a Discovery Call Today

To schedule a personalised 1-2-1 coaching session with Ceri or explore our group coaching options, simply email us at hello@cerihand.com

This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/

This episode is part of a nine-part series on commissions. How to prepare for them, respond to them, deliver them, and, crucially, how to stop them burning you out. If you haven't followed the podcast yet, hit follow so you don't miss an episode.

Today, episode four of nine. And this is where the series shifts gears.

For the last three episodes, we have been doing the preparation work. The mindset. The five signatures of under-pricing. The commission ecosystem.

Today, an enquiry has arrived.

This is the moment most artists get wrong because this is the moment their nervous system takes over. When an enquiry lands in your inbox. And before you've finished reading it, your stomach has tightened, your brain is already drafting a reply, and somewhere in the next three sentences you're going to offer availability, ideas, enthusiasm, and a half-committed yes – all before you know you are a good fit.

And the principle is this. Before you reply with anything, you filter. How, is what today´s episode is about.

KEY TAKEAWAYS


Ceri´s short enquiry form is a low-friction sieve: it quietly filters out tire-kickers, and a serious client will fill it in within 10 minutes. The right questions reveal what they actually want, how committed they are, whether they really get your work, and whether their budget and timeline are realistic.


After the enquiry form, you move into a chemistry call – 30 minutes - to ask important questions and spot red flags. Then, produce an alignment document to further test understanding.


If the client confirms the alignment document, you move forward; if they come back with big changes, it’s a sign you weren’t fully aligned on the call – it’s far better to catch that now than 3 months into making.

BEST MOMENTS

“Stage one of responding to any inquiry is the initial filter, low friction, high signal, a sieve, not a conversation.”

“If those signals are weak, you slow things down, you don't ghost them, but you don't rescue them, you reply politely with more questions,”

“The alignment document - a short-written document that confirms in writing what you heard, not a proposal, not a quote, an alignment document.”

For a text version of today's teaching, plus new practical guidance every week, you can subscribe to Beat the Block at http://cerihand.com/subscribe

EPISODE RESOURCES

First episode of this 9-part series - https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/designing-the-way-you-want-to-work-the-mindset/id1709105337?i=1000769915059

HOST BIO

With over 35 years in the art world, Ceri has worked closely with leading artists and arts professionals, managed public and private galleries and charities, and curated more than 250 exhibitions and events. She has sold artworks to major museums and private collectors and commissioned thousands of works across diverse media, from renowned artists such as John Akomfrah, Pipilotti Rist, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Vito Acconci. Now, she wants to share her extensive knowledge with you, so you can excel and achieve your goals.

**

Ceri Hand Coaching Membership: Group coaching, live art surgeries, exclusive masterclasses, portfolio reviews, weekly challenges. Access our library of content and resource hub anytime and enjoy special discounts within a vibrant community of peers and professionals. Ready to transform your art career? Join today!

https://cerihand.com/membership/

**

Unlock Your Artworld Network Self Study Course

Our self-study video course, "Unlock Your Artworld Network," offers a straightforward 5-step framework to help you build valuable relationships effortlessly. Gain the tools and confidence you need to create new opportunities and thrive in the art world today.

https://cerihand.com/courses/unlock_your_artworld_network/

**

Book a Discovery Call Today

To schedule a personalised 1-2-1 coaching session with Ceri or explore our group coaching options, simply email us at hello@cerihand.com

This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/

I have two guests on the podcast today, and they have made something extraordinary together.

The first drew queer Britain into being for sixty years and quietly refused to call any of its art. It paid the mortgage. It was cheaper than being a window cleaner. He published the world's first LGBTQ+ graphic novel in 1983, drew for Gay News, Capital Gay and The Guardian, made safer-sex campaigns through the AIDS crisis, and hung a nineteen-metre banner at Carrow Road for Justin Fashanu. All of which he called work - never art.

That guest is cartoonist David Shenton. The artist who finally insisted it was art is Ian Giles.

Together they have made Kindly Ease the Tension, David's first ever institutional retrospective. It begins with a small burnt doll, dressed in clothes knitted by a boy in a Lancashire terrace house and thrown into the fire by his father. The doll survived. So did the boy.

In this conversation we get into what happens when somebody finally calls your sixty years of work art. We talk about the Duvet of Love; an AIDS memorial David stitched in a bedsit that he never meant to be art. We talk about the trans baton being passed in a moment when many in the gay community have gone quiet. We talk about censorship and the rising conservatism in the arts, the works that have to be shown after hours, the double standard between classical nudity and queer images. And we talk about what intergenerational care actually looks like in practice. 

David is seventy-seven and says this retrospective has stretched his horizon by another ten years. There is a lesson in that for all of us.

KEY TAKEAWAYS


Some of the most important opportunities in your career won’t arrive through a formal application process. They happen because you care enough to ask the question, start the conversation, or create the thing you wish existed.


What feels awkward, unfashionable, or difficult in one chapter of your life may be exactly what gives your work its depth and originality later on - resist the temptation to self-censor.

BEST MOMENTS

“The work you make at your kitchen table, when nobody is watching, may turn out to be the archive of a generation. Keep going. Pass the baton when it is time.”

“I really wanted to live in a world where there was a David Shenton retrospective.”

RESOURCES

https://www.instagram.com/d.shenton

https://www.instagram.com/iangiles

https://www.museumscollections.norfolk.gov.uk/collections-object-page?id=NWHCM%20:%202016.221.1

HOST BIO

With over 35 years in the art world, Ceri has worked closely with leading artists and arts professionals, managed public and private galleries and charities, and curated more than 250 exhibitions and events. She has sold artworks to major museums and private collectors and commissioned thousands of works across diverse media, from renowned artists such as John Akomfrah, Pipilotti Rist, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Vito Acconci. Now, she wants to share her extensive knowledge with you, so you can excel and achieve your goals.

Ceri Hand Coaching Membership: Group coaching, live art surgeries, exclusive masterclasses, portfolio reviews, weekly challenges. Access our library of content and resource hub anytime and enjoy special discounts within a vibrant community of peers and professionals. Ready to transform your art career? 

https://cerihand.com/membership/

Unlock Your Artworld Network Self Study Course

Our self-study video course, "Unlock Your Artworld Network," offers a straightforward 5-step framework to help you build valuable relationships effortlessly. Gain the tools and confidence you need to create new opportunities and thrive in the art world.

https://cerihand.com/courses/unlock_your_artworld_network/

Book a Discovery Call 

To schedule a personalised 1-2-1 coaching session with Ceri or explore our group coaching, email us at hello@cerihand.com

This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/