Ken talks to Elaine Midgley, Part 1 — Bedford Creative Arts: The Story So Far

We sit down with Elaine Midgley, director of Bedford Creative Arts — a charity using creativity as a social tool across Bedford for over 40 years. Elaine shares her journey from aspiring actress to arts manager, and how BCA navigates funding from the Arts Council, grants and local commissions. We hear how Covid forced a bold pivot — ditching permanent premises to become a truly community-embedded organisation. From AI-powered portrait exhibitions to murals celebrating Bedford's unsung heroes, this is a fascinating look at how art quietly shapes the town around us.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Welcome to the Bedford Podcast. We are at a different venue today. We are at Bedford Heights and we're in the courtyard and we're outside. So this is real, as you all understand when you hear helicopters go over, sirens, and maybe a bit of air conditioning unit. So don't worry about that. Today's guest is someone helping shape the creative heartbeat of Bedford, Elaine Midgley. He's the director of Bedford Creative Arts and chair of the Bedford Cultural Partnership, leading projects that bring art, culture and the communities together across our town. From local creativity to major national events like Olympic Tour T relay and a Tour de France. Elaine has spent years helping people connect through culture and today we are going to hear her story. Hello Elaine. Hello. So I think the easiest place to start is to just explain to us what Bedford Creative Arts is and does.

SPEAKER_01 1:15

Right. So we're an arts charity and we've been going in Bedford for over 40 years now. So we were founded in 1985 and we were originally a local authority arts development project back in the days when local authorities had budgets for that kind of thing. And essentially what we do is we use art like a social tool. So we use it as a tool to address things that support communities. So that might be helping them to feel more positive about where they live, it might be supporting their artists. We work across neighbourhoods, so we might work deeply in communities, we work in schools with children and young people, we work outside of schools with children and young people. We also work with communities that we think usually have the least access to art.

SPEAKER_00 2:31

But all age groups.

SPEAKER_01 2:39

And sometimes we do what we would call like a flagship project, which is just something big and fun that really is something that no one else could do other than us. If we didn't come in and do it, it might not happen. So that might be a big exhibition at the Higgins Museum that's using virtual reality technology or something like that, where we think, do you know what? We want to bring this to Bedford, let's make it happen.

SPEAKER_00 3:02

Okay. Now it's really interesting because you're I'll just explain to our listeners, always sort of say whether you're a Bedfordian or an honorary bedford. You're honorary bedford, um working in the area on somewhat that's very uh dear to the heart of of many people. Um have you always been into the arts and creativity? Is is this something that you've harboured from being a young girl?

SPEAKER_01 3:25

Yeah, yeah. Theatre was my routine. I loved performing when I was a kid, and I used to want to be an actress. Um and I was very briefly for about five minutes, and then didn't do much. Any major films? Uh I auditioned for Steven Spielberg film once. And you didn't even make the film, very, very boring. But I know, very boring. But no, I started in that kind of performance route, did a theatre degree and started working for a theatre company and working with young people, so I was a youth theatre director for a bit. Um and then I quickly realised that actually I wasn't very good at being a theatre practitioner, being on the stage, being a director. It was all a bit scary, and I had some business skills, and I quite like that stuff as well, actually. So I retrained, did an MA in arts management, and got into management of theatre companies, and I ended up working for a local authority in Cambridge, and that's how I got into major events production and that kind of thing. Um, and then I got into things like fundraising and all the other aspects you have to be able to do to manage an arts organisation. Um, and after years doing that, that's what led me to Bedford when this vacancy was available. So I joined BCA back in 2018, right? Uh right at the end of the year. And I had one normal year with BCA before the pandemic hit, and everything changed. Oh gosh. So we got a year in in Bedford before the change that was the pandemic.

SPEAKER_00 4:53

So I was gonna ask and that about funding. So, you know, where do you get your money from? How do you raise money? And but now I'd be really interested as well to know. So, how difficult then did that make it when you're suddenly hit by COVID? So you're you're suddenly put in charge, and then someone throws you a massive curveball and says, Oh, yeah, by the way, you've just got to deal with COVID as well, and we ain't gonna let you out, uh, we ain't gonna let people socialise, we ain't gonna let people go to the arts and what have you. So, crack on. So, how how on earth did that affect you and where how do you fund it now?

SPEAKER_01 5:28

So the funding thing is interesting. We we have been for a long time what the arts council call a national portfolio organisation. So the arts council fund people in different ways in the arts. They'll either fund you for a project they like or they might fund you because you are an organisation they like, and that's that's lovely if you get that status, and they only do so many a year, um so many every three years. Um, but we're really lucky that we've been a national portfolio organisation for some time, and that provides about 50% of our core income. So that will cover quite a lot of our salaries and overheads for the core team, and then when it comes to all the projects, we have to go out and fund rows for every single one of them, and that's usually grant fundraising. So it could be lottery or it could be government grants or it could be private funders like Paul Hamlin Foundation or someone like that, um, or much smaller funders like local businesses and that kind of thing. Okay, um, so it's a bit of a mix, um, and we can be commissioned, so sometimes businesses and local authorities will commission us and they will just say, We've got an idea for a project, can we just pay you to deliver it? So that helps as well. And then when it when it was the pandemic, we we used to have at that time VCA's been in different places over the years. So back in the 80s when we were first founded, we worked um as at the cemetery, what was known as the Gatehouse.

SPEAKER_00 6:46

Right. Okay. So we had a little Bedford Cemetery.

SPEAKER_01 6:49

Yeah, Bedford Cemetery. So we had like a a bit of a studio cum workshop space there. We were there for many years. So those Lomburg audience who may remember us when we were called Bedford Community Arts back at that time might think of us as the Gatehouse. We had a period where we had um a premises on the High Street, we had a gallery there, and we would do artist residences on the high street. Oh, okay. And then when I joined, we were on Midland Road on the corner with Pre-Bren Street, right? And we had studios. So, and we had a partnership with a council who owned that building, and it was called I Create, and we had about six artist studios there, and artists would rent studios from us. And what happened during the pandemic was our lease expired, and the government were desperate for money like everybody and wanted to get it up to a commercial release at a time when artists, you know, were not in a position to pay any more for rent. So we decided actually the thing that changed for us then was it really made you think about why are we doing what we're doing. And actually, is it about things like studios? As much as I would love there to be more studios for artists in Bedford, the artists we work with are ones that are good at working in communities. So we decided to become a remote organisation and to actually just jettison the office and to just become people who were visible and out in the community. And what I quite liked about that is that since then we have done more renting of community spaces for meetings and drinking coffees in coffee shops in independent shops in town and actually using those spaces to conduct our work as opposed to you know renting a building and hiding away.

SPEAKER_00 8:24

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:25

So it's been really good in a way, and it it it was tough financially in the sense that we weren't sure what projects we could carry on, but funders were amazingly generous during that time. They knew there were problems, they they changed a lot of their rules about what you had to do about evaluating, they let you shift the boundaries of projects where you might have been doing a project in the community if you needed to move it online, they let all that happen.

SPEAKER_00 8:49

So you so you did have the opportunity then to keep helping uh c within the community, keep doing stuff, but a lot of it would have been online the same as teaching and all that.

SPEAKER_01 8:57

Yeah, exactly. So we did things like um we we created school packs for young people where we did an art drop, we called it, and provided creative art materials and artist-designed activities you could do with them, and we packaged them all up in this sort of very COVID-friendly for conveyor belt and distributed them around to children who might just not have the money to be able to buy, I don't know, modelling clay and lots of colouring paints and stuff at home. So we shipped those out and then we did things like put videos on YouTube of artists doing creative things saying, if you want to join in at home, this is how you would do it. Um, and we also learned a lot more about digital technology. So we created an artwork which I'm not sure what medium we might have used if it hadn't been for Covid, but we had artists who decided to use a games engine that you use for building computer games to create a visual artwork. And so we actually had an artist in Doncaster, an artist in you know Leeds, an artist in Bedford, and you know, they were all collaborating online using this games engine, and then what we exhibited was uh an artistic film at the Higgins, so it eventually came out to the general public, but it enabled us to keep working remotely.

SPEAKER_00 10:10

Fascinating. So a big curveball with COVID, then thankfully we're kind of out of that that mess now. So back to normal life. So how did you transition then back to normal life? What did you get back out there in the community more?

SPEAKER_01 10:25

Yeah, definitely. So at that time we were we were working quite a bit in Queen's Park and we had some artists who were based there, who were working with the local community, and a steering group who were talking to us about what they might like to see commissioned. So we were doing things like mural projects, we did a mural on Carlisle Road, um, and we did um some kind of commissioning of a film that celebrated Queen's Park and some embroidery works and things like that. Um so we did quite a lot of work intensively there, but at the same time we started uh working on various different projects with children and young people in particular, that's when we started to really play with digital technology and get into AR and VR and AI a little bit, which we've done some more of.

SPEAKER_00 11:11

So, do do you have experts that you work with about AI now? Just thinking about moving forward, and we're all starting to use it more and more and more. Um, and if you look at it for its creative side, utterly fantastic. Some of the stuff that I I do in my limited vocabulary, I can use uh AI to actually make it much much more professional, really. Um so do you have you got sort of people that you're relying on or have you got the people that are already there that are using software?

SPEAKER_01 11:44

So the way we tend to work is the core team at BCA, we're all what we would call producers, really. Uh we're not creative ourselves and we don't necessarily have creative talent.

SPEAKER_00 11:55

People might challenge that.

SPEAKER_01 11:57

I'm not I wouldn't consider myself an artist. But whenever we do a project, we try and find who is the best creative individual to respond to this, and we'll either approach someone directly who we think has got the skills we need, or we'll do a call out, and we'll say we don't know who this person is. So if you're out there, let you know just respond to a call out, and that's sometimes a way of meeting new people, yeah, but sometimes we do approach a particular artist who you can just see from their work is working in that area. So for that um VR film that I mentioned, we work with an artist called Mike Stubbs, um, and he was like, I know creatives who are working in the sphere, and I will bring a team around me who will be able to know how to do it. Um and we've also done call outs where we've just gone, I don't know how we do this. One of my favourite projects that we've done more recently with AI was a photography project. So we were working with the community to do a photographic exhibition or portraits of local people. Really nice project at the Higgins. So we had Fujifilm involved, who were very generously as a local employer, gave us access to their beautiful cameras so we could take really high quality photographs, and we even trained members of the community how to use these beautiful cameras and take these pictures. And while we were doing it, we were gonna put the exhibition on at the Higgins, and the Higgins is also a museum, so then we started talking to them about the history of photography and did they have old cameras, and we even got glass paint photography done of these community members. And then we were thinking, oh, what about the future of photography? And that led us to AI. And we thought it would be great to do something in this exhibition that commented on where photography might be going with AI. Didn't have a Scooby how to do it, did a call out, we you know, always advertised them nationally to say who might be out there who wants to do this, and found two artists, one of whom works for Google, and one of whom works in the medical sector using AI to create technology in that context, and they said, Yeah, we've got an idea. And what they built was a little computer which we called uh Jess. So Jess stood for just examining systemic stereotypes, and what this computer did was it would look at a real portrait. So we'd show it one of the portraits of our community that we'd taken using a proper camera, and then it would describe what it could see in a very AI kind of way. It would kind of give it tags, I see a uh you know a man with this colour eyes, I'm gonna say it's this old, all the sort of thing, wearing a blue jumper, etc. And then what it would do was a different computer program would take that description and draw a new image. So it was a little bit like a game of Chinese whispers. You've gone from a real photograph of a real person to a an AI description, and then an AI description to an AI image, and then of course what you got to do with the audience was to look at the two and to comment on what you saw. And it was fascinating, absolutely fascinating.

SPEAKER_00 14:55

Well they were there was there any similarities between the remote.

SPEAKER_01 15:00

It was about as close as you get, I think. You know, and then you'd go, mmm, how's it really? I mean, you've got all of the mistakes that AI image generators often do. You'd sometimes get people with three legs and too many fingers and that kind of thing. Um you what you mostly notice was systemic bias in AI. Um, my favourite example of both benefit and bias of this was that we had a a a guy working in our team, really lovely guy, um who uh was from Uganda and had Ugandan heritage. So he's a black man, he had dreads hair, um, and he he allowed his image to be used for this. Um and one of the tags that it gave in the AI description was a word that none of us recognised on the team, and he said, That's my tribe. That's the tribe that I'm from in Uganda.

SPEAKER_00 15:52

Well, and AI knew that.

SPEAKER_01 15:54

So there was something about his facial features and how he looked that the AI was able to identify not just that he was a Uganda man, but it could even label which tribe he was descended from. So we were blown away. But I kid you not, one of the other tags it gave him was London Gang member.

SPEAKER_00 16:13

Oh dear. It giveth and it taketh the weapon. So you've seen the best of you've seen the best of it and what you worry about the worst of it as well, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:21

And so we we were just putting that into the exhibition to just give audiences the opportunity to just sort of reflect on you know the risks and opportunities that technology presents in something like photography. And it was just a really interesting conversational tool, but that kind of thing's quite good fun.

SPEAKER_00 16:38

There's something that comes to mind we talked about that, we talked about murals, and one of the things that sits in the back of my mind, I have these ideas that fest you away for years and years, and you're the right person to talk to now. So if you go to Stevenage and go in one of the underpasses, if you're on the if you park up and then go to the theatre at Stevenage, um you go through the underpass, and there's amazing murals of anyone and everyone who's ever achieved anything in Stevenage, and and there's a lot of people, and some problems say, Well, there is Lewis Hamilton for one, although he wasn't very uh complimentary about Stevenage at one point, but it's amazing. And I I would love to see something like that in Bedford, Kempston, surrounding sort of area. We've got some amazing people that have uh come from the area, and uh the obvious one uh you've got Paula Ratcliffe comes to mind, Lizzie Elliott, because I'm kind of sports-oriented, so I I think about people like them. You've got the the the Bedford Eagles football team when they played Arsenal ever at Newcastle. I think they beat Newcastle together. So stuff like that should be commemorated, and I just wonder somewhere in this town. So let me put that in your subconscious, and one day we should have um murals somewhere in the area that celebrate all the good and great.

SPEAKER_01 17:58

I think it's a lovely idea. It is a lovely idea, and we we've done quite a few murals actually reasonably recently. Um and one of them was there's a mural at the bus station which you may or may not have seen of Joe Clough, who was the first uh British black bus driver and taxi driver in Bedford. Um so he actually became the first British bus driver when he was living in London, but he moved to Bedford.

SPEAKER_00 18:21

I was just sorry, I was just gonna say he he was the the first black bus driver moved to Bedford. Right. I I knew the story.

SPEAKER_01 18:28

So he became a Bedfordian as opposed to coming to here.

SPEAKER_00 18:30

An honorary Bedfordian.

SPEAKER_01 18:31

An honorary Bedfordian, he's an honorary Bedfordian, um, but one of those people who wasn't, you know, again commemorated anywhere. Um we just thought actually that's the sort of thing we should be doing. Something at the bus station, that felt like the place to do it, really. I mean it's quite a charming uh mural now. Yeah. Um and we did a few of those because that we were really keen to try and encourage the local authority to consider more public art in the town centre, and they were a bit nervous about it when we first approached them. And one of the ways that we persuaded them to let us do it was by saying rather than paint really big murals that are very Bristolian or whatever, actually we do them in a sort of small, compact way, like the sort of ghost signs that you see down, say, Midland Road, where you've still got a bit of um grace cigarettes on the water.

SPEAKER_00 19:21

It's a whole uh project. There's there's recordings, uh you can you can look it up online. There's there's a log of all the ghost signs in the country all over the place. And Bedford and Kempston, there's there's quite a few.

SPEAKER_01 19:33

Yeah, we've uh yeah, it's really interesting actually.

SPEAKER_00 19:36

You notice them when you suddenly I bet just explain what a ghost sign is, just so that people don't know.

SPEAKER_01 19:42

It's normally like uh an old advertising sign, perhaps it's a Victorian type area, where you would have painted it straight onto the wall. Um and they they're normally sort of high up above shops on high streets advertising some brand or something. And of course they've been there so long and a lot of their painting. It takes a long time to wear off, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 20:01

It's original social media.

SPEAKER_01 20:02

So it's the original social media, yeah, it's original poster boards, billboards painted up, and they've just sort of faded over time. Um, but they're sort of like they do represent like a ghost of the past when you see them. Um so we painted a couple of ones that there's one on Mill Street, um, which has Cardington on it, which has got the Cardington sheds, and we felt we wanted something in the town centre which represented the Cardington story. So we did it a little bit instead of the ghost sign, you know, it's not too big, it's compact, it just says Cardington, slightly art deco kind of lettering, but it represents Cardington in Bedford Town Centre. That's Elaine.

SPEAKER_00 20:37

There should be more. There should be more of that. There are so many things to celebrate about this to Allen's, you know, the uh the generators that we used on the was it the Titanic they made the generators for, I think, or something. But stuff like that we should be celebrating that, and it there should be mural. But I like the idea that they don't necessarily have to cover the whole side of a building. And then there could be walks created based on all of the commemorative um murals that are done around town.

SPEAKER_01 21:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:06

So this is brilliant. We've got all this agreed. I'm gonna note this, action point it, and so far all the action points are for you.

SPEAKER_01 21:12

Yeah, they are very good.

SPEAKER_00 21:13

So uh we need to get people doing these murals. I think it's I think honestly, I think it's something we're missing out on. I mean we need to get the council on board with this as well. So that's what we're gonna do. Oh, brilliant, right? Okay, so um we're gonna take a short break now, and then we're gonna come back and we're gonna talk about some of the what the future holds for Bedford Create Art, any little projects that you've got on the go, and uh we're gonna talk about some of your favourite places locally as well, because we're not always gonna well the whole thing is about Bedford today, but we're gonna bring it back to you and your personal choices or places you like to go socially or for the art. So we'll take a short break and we'll be back soon.

unknown 22:00

And all about it.

SPEAKER_00 22:03

And we hope that talk in Bedford makes you smile.