Amy's First Week Reflections

What jumped up is...  

Jumped up theatre is a company that brings art and culture to the people of Peterborough that wouldn’t of necessarily had much access before. They achieve this by producing different events, workshops and projects to a wide range of people this includes people of different ages, ethnicity, backgrounds and disabilities. I wanted to work with Jumped Up doing an apprenticeship, so that I can be a part of the team that brings art and culture to Peterborough, which leads to improvements in the city and lives of the people who live within it.  

Past inspirations  

I am a young person doing an apprenticeship and I have a great passion for arts and crafts, I love to create art that is random and out of the ordinary. My goal with my art is to have it speak to people when they are viewing it whether it would be consciously or subconsciously. An example of this would be an abstract piece I painted with watercolour, were I tried to represent lives craziness and how there are life stories going on all around us that we will probably never know completely, I believe this piece speaks to people when they come to crossroads in their lives and that it helps to give them perspective. 

Also, I have done a few pieces that are never meant to be understood by the public and that were only meant to be understood by myself. This is because they are pieces were I have just had fun and gone crazy with whatever I was putting on the page. However when I met my colleague McKenzie, I knew that they would be able to understand one of these pieces that I had done, so I showed them it and they really liked it which filled my heart with hope when it came to the massive backlog of these messy type pieces.  

How I got here  

I grew up doing a lot of arts and crafts with my older sister, because of this I decided to study art at college. studying art made me appreciate the use of colours while organising to do lists, calendars and notes. Colour is important because it helps to form links in your memory between the colour and the information presented. My favourite part of studying graphic design was when I learnt about formats of a page and how to lay everything out so that the feel of each page was the same as the last, this helped to bring all the pages of the same project together so that anyone who saw them knew they were all part of the same project.  

This helped many future projects that I created to look more professional than they had done in the past, whether it was a personal or professional project that I was working on, it brought everything I created to the next level. However the main thing that I took away from my time studying art was the fact that there was no wrong answer when it came to describing and analysing a piece, I already had a firm idea of this from my English lessons when I analysed quotes. But studying art and having to write annotations about pieces really reenforced this idea and helped me to understand the process that most people go through when looking at different pieces for themselves.  

Where I am now  

The work environment while doing this apprenticeship is quite different from college and school because you get to control most of your day due to the fact you do not get an hour-by-hour schedule like you would have in school. By doing this apprenticeship I hope to gain knowledge of how the art industry operates so that I can broader my social skills which will help with networking, which will lead being too able to gain an audience so that I can share the art that I create. I am hoping to further my creative arts knowledge and learn more about the industry.  

During the first week of this apprenticeship, I’ve enjoyed feeling like part of the team in the office, having responsibility when it came to doing some admin, as well as getting to join in with running events like the sounding board. When I got involved with the sounding board, I got to see how having a creative outlet helps the young people and how they interact with each other in a creative way. This is important because young people like myself need a space to explore the arts and be themselves in a safe and nurturing environment.  

During the sounding board, we explored the how the different people in our lives felt about our own failures, these people included friends, family, teachers and the world. Discussing how these different people felt about our failures really put our failures into perspective when it came to how much they actually matter in life. After we had finished discussing how the people in our lives are affected by our failures, the young people of the sounding board and I went through some pros and cons of some different website designers and I gathered their thoughts for future websites that will be aimed at their age group. Overall in the last couple of weeks, I have built great relationships with my co-workers in and out of the office which has turned into a brilliant warmth filling environment to work in.  

Where I want this apprenticeship to take me 

After this apprenticeship I want to be able to share my work with everyone without hesitation, like the hesitation I have now when it comes to showing people my artwork. I believe this apprenticeship will give the confidence to do so as well as improving upon my art skills. Also, I want to become the person that everyone goes to when they need help coming up with a crafty solution to their problems, like an arts and craft guru.