Creative careers after ARTEXPRESS

It’s been 40 years since the first ARTEXPRESS exhibition was held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, bringing together outstanding work from HSC visual arts students from across NSW.

Here, past exhibitors who are currently working in the creative industries share their favourite memories of being in ARTEXPRESS and how this formative experience sparked their interest in pursuing a career in the arts.

The Q&A is an edited transcript from a panel discussion hosted by Lily Cooney, Ianni Huang and Lachlan Thompson from the Art Gallery’s Youth Collective at Art After Hours on Wednesday 1 February 2023, in conjunction with the ARTEXPRESS 2023 exhibition.

The panel of speakers included illustrator, author and educator Freda Chiu (ARTEXPRESS 2007); artist and arts worker Patrick Cremin (ARTEXPRESS 2008); creative producer and curator Holly Farrell (ARTEXPRESS 2010); and artist Louise Zhang (ARTEXPRESS 2009).

Freda Chiu has created children’s book illustrations, comics and graphics for Allen and Unwin, Walker Books, Hardie Grant, Penguin Random House, SBS, ABC and Singapore Airlines, among others. Her debut picture book as author and illustrator, A trip to the hospital, was shortlisted for the 2022 IBBY Ena Noël Award and the 2022 Children’s Book Council of Australia Award for New Illustrator. She also lectures in illustration and animation design at the University of Technology Sydney.

Patrick Cremin uses painting and photography to explore the urban environment and those that occupy it. In addition to his art practice, he has held positions at the Brett Whiteley Studio, Bankstown Arts Centre and the City of Parramatta, and was a founding co-director of Archive Space, an artist-run gallery in the Sydney suburb of Newtown from 2012 to 2015. He is currently the arts and culture specialist at Bayside NSW, working to highlight South Sydney as a creative destination.

Holly Farrell has worked within various public, commercial and independent arts organisations, and on multidisciplinary arts festivals, arts event management and community-led projects. She is currently the curator at The Lock-Up in Newcastle, where she works across cultural programming, installation, marketing and communications.

Louise Zhang is a Chinese-Australian artist who practice spans painting, sculpture and installation. Inspired by horror cinema, Chinese mythology and botany, her work contrasts the attractive and the repulsive to navigate the fear, anxiety and sense of otherness that reflects her identity.

Did exhibiting in ARTEXPRESS inspire you to pursue a career in the arts, and when did you realise you wanted to pursue this path?

PC: I think exhibiting in ARTEXPRESS was definitely a moment for me of validation. Up until that point I hadn’t really spoken to any artists or any arts workers. Having your artworks on the walls in the Art Gallery gave me a kind of pathway or a clear kind of focus to go, ‘Okay, this thing that I'm interested in doing – putting paint on bits of board – someone else thought that was cool’. That validation was really important for me.

FC : I’d always wanted to be an artist of some sort; the question of what kind of an artist I wanted to be was to be explored later. But getting into ARTEXPRESS really gave me that validation and that boost of confidence I think I needed.

After I graduated from high school, I studied visual communications at UTS thinking that I was going to become a graphic designer and create beautiful contexts for other people’s artworks, because I didn’t really know that a job as an illustrator even existed. I was always into drawing and during my studies got back into it. Along the way I met a lot of great mentors who just kept encouraging me, like my fourth-year tutor who saw the weird, creepy drawings that I was doing at the time and was like, ‘You know this is what you can be’. Then the more internships and people I connected with within the art and design world, the more clear I felt about my path. It just kind of keeps snowballing from there. I think, as a young artist, it’s very difficult to navigate the world, and if you put yourself out there, I guarantee you, you’re going to find other like-minded people to encourage you to make art.

HF: ARTEXPRESS was a very exciting time, but art definitely wasn’t something I wanted to pursue. I went straight to uni and did a year of teaching, then freaked out once it came to prac – I did not want to go to the school. I changed over to visual communications, was really keen to become an illustrator or graphic designer of some sort, got a job at Newcastle Art Gallery as a gallery assistant and that’s kind of when I changed – working behind the scenes, seeing how you install shows, handle artworks, working with collections just got me very excited. I did a bit of design for them as well, but then I just felt like I needed to really get in there. So I went back to uni, did my masters in curating and cultural leadership at UNSW, and kept progressing from there. The more people you meet, it just keeps growing. There have been so many different experiences and opportunities since ARTEXPRESS.

LZ: I’m similar to Freda in the sense that I knew I wanted to work in the creative industry, but I wasn’t quite sure which avenue to go down. I knew I had to be creative, but I also was facing the dilemma of wanting to make a living, an assurance that I could make a living. Art and design doesn’t exactly guarantee that. However, being part of ARTEXPRESS, it kind of gave me a sense of hope and a boost of encouragement. I didn’t think someone like me could possibly be in the arts or succeed in the arts, and so being part of ARTEXPRESS was like, ‘Look at where your work is and you’re only 17, so you might as well give it a shot’. So I gave it a shot. You know [at the end of high school, for tertiary studies] you have to choose your preferences. Art wasn’t my first preference at all, but after experiencing ARTEXPRESS, I was like, ‘I can do this’. So I pursued a degree in fine arts and I’m still an artist.

Could you provide any practical advice or suggest useful skills that young people could develop to help them establish a career in the arts?

PC: I think one thing is keeping curious and asking lots of questions. You walk into an art gallery and a number of people who are working there have probably studied fine arts or arts management – ask questions. ‘How did you end up in that industry?’ Or ‘What do you like about doing this job?’ A lot of the time people are very excited just to have a chat and talk about what they’re doing. And if you are interested in what they love and they love doing, they’ll probably give you a lot of good advice.

FC: I totally agree with that. That’s actually how I gain most of my knowledge now – by asking people. My advice is more specific to visual artists and illustrators: at the very beginning of your career, just develop your practice as much as possible. And by that I mean make a lot of work, and I mean make a lot of bad work as well, so that you can push through that and then the good work will emerge. But not just because of that. I think the more work that you create, the more you start realising what your own preferences are, what your own world views are, and then eventually that actually becomes your own visual style or visual ‘voice’, which is very important if you want to pursue a career in illustration, like the stuff that I do. Young people these days – oh, I feel so old  saying young – but young people these days have such great access to all these amazing social media platforms and ways of documenting your work in interesting ways. So start now. Don’t even just start when you go to uni. Find creative ways of documenting your work and showing people, because I think the more you show people your work, the more confidence that you have to actually call yourself an illustrator or an artist or whatever creative worker you are.

HF: My suggestion for institutional kind of careers is a bit of a cliche – volunteering. It’s not accessible to everyone. You’re working, you’re studying at the same time. But it’s a great way to get hands-on experience, and especially in places like Newcastle where there are a lot of smaller institutions, you have more opportunity to get more hands on, learn, install, experience art handling, working with collections, that kind of thing. But if you can’t do that, just even going to things, meeting people, making a community. It’s a great way to show people who are in the arts that this is what you want to do and you’re really excited about it.

LZ: We were all talking before about how we wish we learned how to survive outside of uni after doing art, because in the end it is a business. There are business components to it. And so one of the things I recommend is creating a website or social media, having your work seen, just like Freda said. Because if no one sees your work, they’re not going to know you’re out there. If you can document your work as much as possible, pop it online, keep it up to date (documentation of your work lasts longer than the actual work itself), it can take you so many places. It’s not just for your portfolio. Your work can go into articles, magazines, be licensed. You get paid for your work when it’s licensed. There are so many things you can do with documentation. I really do encourage that.

Louise Zhang also spoke to Look magazine about ARTEXPRESS for the article Head start.