Creating meaning from found materials with Justine Watt

Justine Watt is an award-winning Scottish sculptor. Working with unwanted everyday objects, her work explores how we might reuse more and throw away less.

From running away to join the circus to becoming an award-winning sculptor, in this episode, Justine discusses her incredible life stories and how they fuel and inspire her current creative practice. She also shares some wonderful insights for young artists and designers at the start of their creative journey.

Website: https://www.justinewatt.co.uk/

Discover more about UAL Awarding Body qualifications.

Transcript

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Matt: Hello and welcome back to a new series of the Teach Inspire Create podcast. I'm Matt Mosley, chief Examiner for Art and Design at UAL Awarding Body. In this podcast, I speak to a [00:00:15] fascinating range of people who work all across the creative arts about how they have made their way into their current roles, their impactful teaching experiences, and the people and things that inspire them.

Matt: Through these conversations, we hope to show you that there are endless [00:00:30] ways to belong in the creative world. Today my guest is Justine Watt, an award-winning sculptor who works with unwanted everyday objects. Her work explores how we might reuse more and throw away less. In this episode, I talk [00:00:45] to Justine about how she began her art career later in life, her incredible life stories and how they inform her current creative practice, and she shares some wonderful insights for young artists and designers at the start of their creative journey. 

Matt: Hello, [00:01:00] Justine.

Justine: Hi Matt.

Matt: Thank you for joining us today. You've traveled quite a long way to be here, haven't you?

Justine: I have. I've come from deepest, darkest Dumfries and Galloway.

Matt: That might be the longest trip I think someone has ever made to join us on the podcast. So, [00:01:15] thank you. We usually start the podcast by asking our interviewee, do you have an early memory of creating or creativity?

Justine: That's a very good question. When I was about nine or ten, I do remember doing a clay class at school and [00:01:30] making a dog with a great big, long tail, you know, like a pointer dog.

Justine: And I remember the whole process of firing it and it going in the kiln and the tail stayed okay, but for some reason, I put it in my bike [00:01:45] basket and decided to cycle home. I remember I just went to the basket and it had gone, somebody had stolen it and it wasn't very good, but I have no idea why that happened.

Justine: But yeah, that's my memory.

Matt: Someone loved it enough to rehome it, but there's something lovely, I suppose [00:02:00] about that process, isn’t it? The first time you encounter one of those creative processes - it's like sort of alchemy, isn't it? Where you make something outta one thing and then it goes in something and comes out something completely different.

Justine: I do remember the [00:02:15] smell of that classroom really well. And that whole process of when you press the clay and take all the air bubbles out and that kind of rolling it out. It seems like a long time ago now.

Matt: And so was there creativity at home?

Justine: Yes. Yes. Both my parents had studied at [00:02:30] Dundee. At Jordanstone and had actually met there in, I guess it would be the late sixties, early seventies.

Justine: And my dad had studied painting, and my mom was doing silversmithing and then into sculpture. And he had left [00:02:45] when he graduated and become the breadwinner. And my mom had had children, so both of them didn't work in that field for a long time. And then my mom continued on after, I guess when we were grown up myself, my brother.

Justine: And now sculpts [00:03:00] and does really well. And my brother is a painter. But I didn't kind of take that first footing into art. No.

Matt: Yeah. You did some other things in life.

Justine: I did. Yeah, I did. I did other things. So we were in a little town called Cleethorpes, [00:03:15] which is down in the northeast of England. And it was a seaside town with lots of things going on.

Justine: And every year my dad would - he was the tourism manager for the area - so he would invite lots of different, acts and [00:03:30] entertainment things. And one of those was a circus. So each year the circus came to town, my dad would introduce me and I would go along and I would meet all these amazing people like, you know, jugglers and lion tamers and clowns, [00:03:45] and there were animals at that time. I guess it would be the sort of late eighties, early nineties.

Justine: So I was at school fourteen, fifteen, and not doing particularly well, and my heart at that point was basically was with the circus. I [00:04:00] kept just going back to that kind of excitement and those smells and those… strong smells. 

Matt: It's such a romantic sort of adventurous feel about the circus, isn't it?

Justine: So much. So much. Very visceral, and I think back to [00:04:15] that kind of grease paint and candy floss and popcorn and sawdust. So yeah, I left school without any qualifications other than an art GCSE.

Matt: Well done. Good

Justine: Yes. Very pleased about that. 

Matt: Yes, the important one.

Justine: And [00:04:30] then the minute I finished my GCSEs, I ran off.

Justine: I literally left home and went to live with a circus. Yeah.

Matt: And how long were you with the circus for?

Justine: On and off until my twenties.

Matt: Okay.

Justine: So I would kind of go backwards and forwards. It was mainly [00:04:45] around the UK, so places like the Isle of Man and Belfast and Dublin and all these little towns in England.

Matt: Yeah.

Justine: Yeah. When I first joined, I did a thing called this, it was like a spotlight operator. So I would climb these king poles that were sort of forty feet up in the air. And you would [00:05:00] sit on this rickety metal rack and operate the spotlight.Then I would go and run down and do the popcorn at the interval time.

Justine: I would lead in some animals sometimes. And then I got to a point where I just [00:05:15] had this dream that I could maybe be in the circus itself, and my friend said, oh, I'll start to teach you a kind of rope act. And then I had this horrendous accident on my bike where I fell and broke my collarbone and that was the end of my circus career. 

Justine: It was behind the scenes from that point [00:05:30] onwards.

Matt: What was the experience of being in the circus or with the circus like in comparison to how you imagined it before you left?

Justine: Yeah, probably. I mean, you do romanticize things. There's no doubt about that. I think that it’s hard work.[00:05:45]

Justine: Unbelievably hard work. 

Matt: Yeah, it seems like incredibly hard work.

Justine: From doing your last show to the minute that the people leave the show, you start taking the tent down and then that tent comes down over a period of time. And then everything gets packed away, and then you might drive for [00:06:00] four to six hours. Then you get to that next town and then you start building again, building the tent ready to have the show the next day.

Justine: There were really beautiful parts of it because you'd have people from all over the world. Acts coming in from [00:06:15] Venezuela and Mexico and Spain, and it was really multicultural in that respect. And then they would leave at the end of the year, and then you would know that you would never, ever see these people again.

Justine: And maybe this feeling of [00:06:30] being slightly unsettled because you've moved around a lot. And I think probably whether that was already in me, but certainly that carried on within my life for so many years until I found [00:06:45] art, really. And then everything has seemed to settle.

Matt: How did you find art? What was your journey into that?

Justine: So from that period of time, I then did all kinds of different jobs. The great thing about running away with a circus [00:07:00] is that if you don't have an education, it really helps with your CV and it really helps with getting interviews because people have a genuine interest in it. 

Matt: Yeah, absolutely.

Justine: So the fact that I had no education helped me and I would end up working in lots of [00:07:15] sales and marketing jobs and the List and the Scotsman. I went to work in Australia for News International, and then I did a woodworking course.

Justine: I decided that I wanted to maybe work for myself. So it began as [00:07:30] joinery. It began as a genuine kind of a skill. A trade? 

Matt: Right. Why wood, why as a material thinking I'm gonna get some training here?

Justine: Yeah. Many years ago, I'd seen my mom sculpting in wood. My [00:07:45] grandfather on the maternal side had been a carpenter.

Matt: So you had a sort of affinity with it. Sort of familiarity? 

Justine:It was an affinity, absolutely. Then I guess the things that I made became a bit more sculptural. So my dad would say to me, have you [00:08:00] thought about sculpture? Have you thought about going to art school? And this would go on for years and years. And I'd just think, well, I can't do that.

Justine: And then as life, you know, throws these things at you - so often these great big dramatic life changes. My dad [00:08:15] got ill and he passed away, and then suddenly you're just sat thinking about these conversations. Literally within two weeks of my dad's passing, I'd put an application in Edinburgh College.

Matt: Right.

Justine: For an art foundation which, [00:08:30] felt, I mean it was amazing. That rush of whether it was grief or the emotion…

Matt: But that sudden impetus to do something about it. 

Justine: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

Matt: So you make the application to Edinburgh to do the foundation. [00:08:45].

Justine: Yeah.

Matt: What was it like day one when you turned up?

Matt: How did it feel to be there?

Justine: It was incredible. It was maybe myself and another eighty people. It's quite a big course.

Matt: Yeah, it’s a big one.

Justine: There were a couple of mature students, but it was mainly [00:09:00] youngsters. And that whole foundation experience - I feel so fondly about it when I think back. Everything that I learned during that process wasn't without its challenges.

Matt: Yeah.

Justine: So the first [00:09:15] term, you had to deal with these things I didn't understand. Annotations in your sketchbook.

Matt: Yes.

Justine: I was like, what is an annotation?

Matt: Yeah.

Justine: You know, I kept asking my lecturers, what do you want me to write? And they just said, you just need to write from the heart. And it just wasn't [00:09:30] going in for whatever reason.

Justine: So I remember taking my sketchbooks along to the first assessment and I handed in these books, and I got told that I had to go back. It was gonna be a fail. So that was my first term.

Matt: Okay.

Justine: And that was quite hard. [00:09:45] 

Matt: It's a bit of adversity early on.

Justine: Yeah. Because I'd worked really, really hard.

Justine: So it was teaching me a completely different way of thinking. So whilst I was really enjoying all of the practical work, the actual academic side of it - took a long time for my [00:10:00] brain to catch up with all of that.

Matt: Yeah, that is a challenge with the foundation. There is the collision of creative, practical concepts, ideas, themes, and this sort of academic thread that runs through [00:10:15] it in terms of understanding yourself and other practitioners,

Matt: Isn't it? How did that initial experience of the foundation maybe differ from your last preceding memory of learning and being taught?

Justine: Very, very different. [00:10:30] The lecturers, I've become friends with a couple of lecturers. They just treated you completely as an adult and things like… I remember life drawing.

Justine: I wasn't great at life drawing. I loved it. But I didn't have those kind of drawing skills and I guess I [00:10:45] was looking at the timeframe and thinking, well, this is gonna take a lot of practice. So I hadn't come from the school environment like a lot of the other people in the course. So my lecturer, Neil Russell, just looked at me and said, look, do you want to try something else in life drawing?

Justine: And I was like [00:11:00] what? He's like, well do monoprinting. So he allowed me to monoprint within the session. So everybody else would be sitting. It meant I could create one drawing in ten seconds. And then another one in twenty seconds. And yeah, it was great. So monoprinting, [00:11:15] mono just means it's a one-off, so you can't create multiples of monoprinting.

Justine: So you would apply quite a thick layer of ink to your roller on a sheet of glass, or you can use a sheet of Perspex, whatever. You then [00:11:30] apply a sheet of paper over the top of that, and then you quickly draw an image and that image will always be in reverse. So for example, if you were to put text on that, you would have to do it back to front.

Justine: And probably a really good example would be Tracy Emin’s [00:11:45] very quick life drawings of women when she puts text onto them.

Matt: One of the things that I've always loved about monoprinting is that it helps students. It positioned something in between you and the end product. A process that, as you mentioned, [00:12:00] because you didn't feel confident with those drawing skills, but to have 

Matt: something in the way. A process in between that removes that anxiety about the control, doesn't it? Because everything's in reverse and you don't quite know what you're gonna get until you flip it over.

Justine: Absolutely. And I left [00:12:15] that session with maybe thirty drawings rather than, you know, one or two. And with those, I was able to put a really nice slide together for my portfolio when it came to applying for art school in the future.

Matt: For me, the [00:12:30] foundation was the best year of my education through school. Certainly the most transformational experience for me. People go into a foundation, one version and come out another.

Justine: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I said to one of the [00:12:45] lecturers at Edinburgh College recently…. He sort of asked me, why did you do foundation?

Justine: And I said, just to see if I could, because I really didn't know if I was capable. Art school just wasn't even a thought in my brain at that point I was just like, oh, now I'll [00:13:00] just carry on. I remember going into the Royal Scottish Academy with a lecturer to see a Bridget Riley exhibition and then downstairs was another exhibition of lots of people.

Justine: It was like an open submission for people's work and I just remember standing in this [00:13:15] really grand building going, wow, imagine being able to get your work in an exhibition like this.

Matt: Yeah.

Justine: You know, something as grand as the Royal Scottish Academy and fast forward…

Matt: Yeah.

Justine: You know, four years later and I achieved it in that

Justine: very [00:13:30] gallery.

Matt: Yeah.

Justine: So yeah, I loved foundation.

Matt: Great.

Justine: And the fact that you're given all those opportunities to switch between sculpture and textiles and printmaking is just so valuable.[00:13:45]

Matt: You mentioned that your first project assessment didn't go as planned. How did things progress from there? 

Justine: I think I might have [00:14:00] been on the edge of tears. It felt quite monumental because in my head, I was really enjoying it and I was doing loads of work. I was working nonstop, but clearly something wasn't connecting.

Justine: And I do remember a lecturer saying, [00:14:15] Justine, this is supposed to be fun. And I drove home that day and what I did was, I think I looked at other people's sketchbooks.

Matt: Yeah.

Justine: Which in some cases is to be recommended, but not [00:14:30] always 'cause some people worked on these amazing annotations, but I think eventually it just clicked.

Justine: And that probably came from working on my final major project.

Matt: Okay.

Justine: Because I was 100% in control of that [00:14:45] project.

Justine: Of that work from the very first seed right through to the end. 

Matt: Self directed. Self initiated.

Justine: Absolutely. Although, it was just as COVID had hit.

Matt: Right? Okay.

Justine: So there was this kind of bombshell around that, but maybe that [00:15:00] gave me more time to just sit and to be able to really write those thoughts and realise that actually it doesn't have to be neat.

Justine: It just has to be whatever was in my head at that point.

Matt: Just honest. 

Justine: Yeah, honest. Exactly.

Matt: The best version of annotation in a [00:15:15] student's sketchbook is something which is personal, purposeful, honest. I think there's often a concern for students that there have to be long written aspects of their creative work, but they don't. They're in [00:15:30] support of their creativity.

Matt: Essentially brief notes within the context of a sketchbook in the end, but that's a bit of a journey to get to. How did you navigate that and how did your annotations sort of appear at the end when you felt [00:15:45] confident with them?

Justine: I would record my thoughts. It was a realisation that instead of making the work and then trying to record what I was doing, it was a living, breathing kind of sketchbook that was right next to [00:16:00] whatever it was I was doing.

Justine: So if I was casting, the minute I’d finished casting, I would record those thoughts, whatever they were. So right. This mix works. This mix didn't work.

Matt: Yeah.

Justine: Why did it not work? Did I enjoy it? Why not? [00:16:15] I realised it was just, it was very natural for me to write those thoughts down.

Matt: Yeah, that's great. Yeah. 'cause I've found that a lot of the times students get bogged down in being overly descriptive of the thing that they've done, rather than, as you [00:16:30] said, the experience of doing it or whether the thing that they've done has been successful in terms of communicating the idea or the thing that they were trying to say through that process of making.

Justine: Sure, I mean, an annotation is so [00:16:45] personal. It's such an individual thing and means something completely different to somebody else. But now I'm very, very grateful to annotations and what they mean in my work.

Matt: Right. So you mentioned, as well, your final piece for foundation. What did you make? What did you [00:17:00] do?

Justine: The piece of work was called ‘Concrete Bed’, and it was based on my dad's passing at the start of the course. Around about my dad being ill, they brought this hospital bed into the house. My mom and dad's house is always really [00:17:15] beautiful with lots of kind of beautiful things that they'd made or acquired over the years and suddenly there was this clinical metal -

Matt: Yeah.

Justine: kind of

Matt: Very out place.

Justine: Completely outta place bed sitting in the sitting room. [00:17:30] And when I looked at it, it was in three parts. And my son, Wilf, was very small at the time, and it reminded me of those wooden - it's like a sort of two pieces of wood. You have a hammer and you have to knock [00:17:45] pieces of wood

Justine: through it. These two shapes started to kind of merge together in my head. So COVID hit. Suddenly, I was at home as were all the other fellow students, and I wanted to make this bed that [00:18:00] symbolised this bed that had been in the house. So I was like, well, how am I gonna make this?

Matt: Yeah.

Justine: Like, where am I gonna get these materials from?

Justine: I'm not at college anymore. So I put this call out, to see if anybody had any bags of cement because you couldn't buy cement. [00:18:15] 

Matt: Yeah, there was a shortage of absolutely all sorts of building materials. 

Justine: You couldn't buy plastic, you couldn't buy cement. And so I put a call out on - I think it was like a local Facebook group, and some very kind gents got in touch and said, I've got a couple of bags of this old lumpy cement.

Justine: It [00:18:30] may work, it may not work. So I took that and then I realised because I was working on a smaller scale at home. Why don't I make this bed a third of a size

Matt: Okay.

Justine: of a hospital bed. And therefore it's the same size as a cot,

Matt: Right.

Justine: Because [00:18:45] I'd been quite taken by this idea of you arrive into this world in a bed and you leave this world in a bed.

Justine: And I was looking back at photos of my dad with Wilf, and I had this photo of Wilf sitting, banging these dowels through this toy with my [00:19:00] dad in the background. So yeah, I started to make or have a go at casting this bed in three parts

Matt: Right.

Justine: from home and quickly realized what a huge task of this was.

Justine: It broke a few times and that's where my [00:19:15] annotations came in because it kept breaking and I would be like, oh, what am I gonna do? How am I gonna fix this? How am I gonna make this work? So I would just record and record and record and actually, I look back at my sketchbooks at that time and they were completely full.

Justine: So I [00:19:30] successfully managed to get the three parts to slot together and it was as successful as it could have been from home.

Matt: Yeah. Well, and so many complex problems to solve in that. That's lovely. And so you then move on to a degree?

Justine: [00:19:45] No, because - going back to that first term, and the whole sort of sketchbook drama.

Justine: I mean, I just didn't feel ready. It hadn't even been a consideration at that point for me. So I actually ended up doing an HNC in contemporary [00:20:00] art. Um, and then I applied

Matt: Right

Justine: to do a degree.

Matt: Is this the time where this interest in found materials and reclaiming materials and repurposing them…

Matt: Is that where this started to emerge more?

Justine: Yeah. More and more. Because [00:20:15] I would be trying to access materials. And I guess when I first really started to think about these materials was when I was at art school. 

Matt: Right.

Justine: So I was in second year of art school, doing a project, and somebody had given me a whole [00:20:30] load of candles that had gone wonky, that had melted, that weren't working right, for the purpose of being a candle.

Matt: Yeah.

Justine: So I melted them down and then I started to cast with those and then into third year and beyond… [00:20:45] I'd been working with a charity called Reuse Scotland to access lots of things like furniture that people no longer want. So tables and chairs or those kind of things. And they gave me three [00:21:00] huge sack loads of coat hangers that nobody wanted because they're covered in varnish and you can't use them.

Justine: And then for my final project, they gave me some chairs.

Matt: Can you tell us more about the piece of work with the chairs?

Justine: Yeah, absolutely. So that became my final project [00:21:15] for my degree, and it was a piece of work entitled, ‘Once you get a piece of sawdust in your eye, it’s hard to get it out’.

Justine: So this title came from an expression that was used within the circus to describe how circus [00:21:30] people would struggle to leave that environment. Back in twenty, thirty years ago, circuses would've had sawdust within the circus ring and around about the ring would've been what were called ring boxes, which were made of plywood [00:21:45] and modular, and they were

Justine: shaped to be brought in very quickly to create a circus ring; which would make a definition between the circus ring and then the audience. So I'm making my final work for my [00:22:00] degree, and I had started to take apart these chairs and I'm removing the varnish, and I'm left with a chair leg, which has a natural kind of curve to it, and I take the varnish away because part of the reason that nobody wants the chairs is because [00:22:15] they're dark.

Justine: It's sort of not particularly nice looking stain, and the beech would start to kind of show itself and I begin to think about that as the material rather than the object. [00:22:30] And as I'm starting to take away the varnish and I start sanding, there's a very, very strong smell of sawdust. So this process of removing these chair legs is very, very lengthy.

Justine: 'cause I've got twenty, thirty chairs, [00:22:45] so I'm very slowly taking them all apart. And as I'm making the work, I start to think back and I think back to that point in my life when I'm sixteen and I make that decision. Do I stay and try and do something with this one [00:23:00] art qualification and go off and do a foundation at Grimsby College, or do I run off of the circus and I make that choice to run off of the circus.

Justine: So I'm considering all of this as I'm making the work and as I start placing these chair legs together, [00:23:15] these huge big three meter hoops start to emerge from the work. And I'm just thinking back all the time, and these memories are kind of flooding through my head. And it became this incredibly emotional kind of piece of work where I [00:23:30] hadn't realized what I was thinking about as I was making the work.

Justine: I just knew that I was taking these chairs apart. So as I start to make these rings, I then consider, how can I keep them up in the air? How can I place them together? And throughout that, I [00:23:45] then think about making smaller rings, and that's where I use my woodworking skills, I guess. Like curving and steaming to make the smaller parts of the work.

Matt: Yeah. That's amazing. It's just wonderful to hear the[00:24:00] layers to it, but also the materia, the objects, those kind of discarded chairs that had their own sort of story, their life before. But now that repurposing of that material [00:24:15] opened up this whole other retrospective or introspective narrative about your own life and in your experiences. Sometimes students

Matt: feel that spending lots of money on new material [00:24:30] will guarantee some level of success or quality, or enhance the possibility of success, I suppose is probably a better way of saying it. But actually there's something amazing about materials that have their own journey to you and how that [00:24:45] can unlock something in yourself in terms of a creative project.

Justine: Yeah, there were challenges, you know? I had technicians who were amazing, but they weren't happy with the fact that I was using these older materials. [00:25:00] They were trying to encourage me to buy new.

Matt: ‘cause it would be simpler or easier?

Justine: It’s easier. And it's not as messy.

Justine: And you know, you don't have to take the varnish off.

Matt: But there's something in that labor isn't there, I suppose.

Justine: [00:25:15] Absolutely. There's a whole domesticity to that and the fact that the chair is something that we sit on every single day. And that whole part of removing those layers enabled me to do it in a way that I could just stop and start at any point.[00:25:30]

Justine: And it was very repetitive. So I could just go and do part of the chair, then I could stop and then I could fit and then go back into the house and do what I needed to do and then come back. There was a modularity to it because there were, I was making lots of the same thing. [00:25:45] These particular chairs were from a pizza restaurant in the town that I worked in.

Justine: And I think somebody within the gallery, when we put them up, had told me that he told the man that owned the pizza restaurant, he said, I've told him about these and what they look [00:26:00] like now. He was really pleased. That made me happy because these chairs were literally going to landfill.

Matt: Yeah.

Matt: We were [00:26:15] talking about in terms of annotations. And this sort of honesty and purpose. And I think sometimes students worry about making work about themselves. There's a desire often to [00:26:30] look out into the world and make work about things that are far away or massive. Some of the artworks that I love the most are the ones which the artist is so intertwined in the narrative of it, and that's something that [00:26:45]

Matt: comes through in your work. Are there any creative projects or endeavors that you're up to at the moment that you feel comfortable to tell us about?

Justine: Yeah, sure. I have actually just moved back to Dumfries and Galloway with my family.

Justine: So Dumfries and Galloway is [00:27:00] absolutely steeped in amazing artist communities. Really, really gorgeous kind of galleries. And there's a big open studio event called Uplands and Spring Fling that happen every year. At the moment I'm in a kind of reset process [00:27:15] where I'm starting to build up my studio and make. And just make this body of work.

Justine: So that is my plan at the moment, is just to really, really almost have a quiet period of making and just see where that takes me and it [00:27:30] feels really exciting.

Matt: So are you in a process or a stage of sort of collecting materials at the moment?

Justine: Yes, absolutely. And I'm looking more out to, I'm surrounded by Woodland

Justine: and fields. So I'm actually starting to look [00:27:45] more at farm materials around me. 

Matt: Lovely. I mean, that's such a nice part of the process, I imagine, to sort of forage for things and

Matt: go out, be led by what the world just offers up to you. And so I wondered - just thinking [00:28:00] about any students that might be listening to this and maybe are thinking about doing a foundation next year, or just thinking about developing a creative process or practice

Matt: for themselves. I mean, do you have any advice that you might give them?

Justine: [00:28:15] Uh, do it. Absolutely. Everybody should. If they can, do a foundation…

Matt: Yes.

Justine: at some point in their lives. Just try and not worry about any preconceived ideas that they've got from school or from the [00:28:30] outside world when it comes to art foundation. It will steer you in a very natural way and give you so many opportunities along that kind of path.

Justine: I think just the whole act of making will help you in whatever [00:28:45] way. I never set out to make work with me in it.

Matt: Right.

Justine: It just found its way through my work. I think probably I worried that if I was making work about me, the work would become me, but just by the very act of making [00:29:00] the stories naturally have found their way through the work.

Matt: Yeah. It takes a certain level of bravery, doesn't it, to make work about yourself in the sense. There is a vulnerability about sort of talking about your stories, but then I guess through that. You get [00:29:15] a level of authenticity about things, don't you? Because you're talking about the things that you know best.

Matt: They are your stories, aren't they?

Justine: Absolutely. And they're individual. And everybody else on that course will have an entirely different story, and that's really important to remember that as [00:29:30] well. And even though I talked about looking at other people's sketchbooks, don't compare yourself. I can't draw and I really struggle with that. I know that if I practiced and practiced, I’d get better.

Justine: But it's not part of what I want to [00:29:45] do, particularly at the moment. I'm really happy printing and making, doing really scruffy drawings.

Matt: Yeah,

Justine: Yeah, don't compare.

Matt: It's the process that offers the answers, isn't it?

Justine: Yeah. And it's so [00:30:00] therapeutic as well. 'cause you're using your hands and you're working away on whatever that is.

Matt: So in the interest of giving a potential listener a starting point with their own creative process, is there something that you do to kickstart [00:30:15] a period of work or a project?

Justine: I think that whole process of being outside for me. So each day going for a walk. I'm lucky that I live in the middle of nowhere at the moment, but I'm walking and I'm just [00:30:30] taking it in.

Justine: I'm looking up at the sky. I'm looking at the red kites. I'm looking across the hills. I'm seeing what damage has been done to the trees from the storms. I'm just taking it in and listening, not looking at my phone. My phone is completely off [00:30:45] and out the way and just being present.

Matt: I think you're absolutely right.

Matt: Getting out there and being present in the world is so important, isn't it? That's wonderful advice. Thank you ever so much, Justine.[00:31:00]

Matt: So a massive thank you to Justine for traveling so far to join us on the Teach Inspire Create podcast today. Such a wonderfully honest and generous person talking about all of her creative experiences and her [00:31:15] wonderful stories. I absolutely loved talking to her. If you want to know more about Justine's work, we will include links to her website and social media in the podcast episode description.

Matt: Thanks again for listening. We really hope you've enjoyed this episode, and [00:31:30] if you did, recommend it to someone else. Take care. See you again soon. Bye-bye.