AccessArt Core Value No 1: Growth is Driven by Ideas, Opportunities and Reflection
AccessArt Core Value #1 “Growth is driven by ideas, opportunities and reflection” illustrated by Yu-Ching Chiu.
Yu-Ching is an illustrator, designer and artist educator working in Cambridge. Yu-Ching graduated from Cambridge School of Art with an MA degree in Illustration and Book Arts. She is passionate about visual storytelling and enjoys working with a mixture of digital and analogue methods.
When Yu-Ching applied to illustrate our first core value we were instantly drawn to her calming and contemplative visual language. We loved how she combines mixed media; creating works on paper and moving it through to the digital realm to add extra touches to her painterly style.
The theme of Yu-Ching’s work often touches upon state of mind, which she uses to create narratives that resonate with her audience. She spoke about how, as people, we respond to transformation – the type of transformation that we don’t always expect or understand – and how we can take these experiences, both accidental and purposeful, and use them to grow. This really resonated with our core value ‘growth is driven by ideas, opportunities and reflection’ as we felt that it touched upon the idea of growth coming to us in different ways and how we can identify, reflect and respond with a new found freedom and clarity.
We love the outcome of Yu-Ching’s commission, sharing a tale of how the thoughts and actions of individuals can work towards achieving something amazing for all.
AccessArt Value #1
Growth is driven by ideas, opportunities and reflection.
What kind of growth makes us feel stimulated and fulfilled? As individuals, what drives us to keep creating? As communities, what makes us fair, inclusive and forward-thinking?
Society is saturated with measures of growth, and as individuals we often feel the pressure to prove, map and compare our own growth in all kinds of ways. But what other kinds of growth are there that sit outside a wrapper of numbers, and that don’t rely on the assumption that a bigger number means more success?
For AccessArt, growth has been both defined and driven by ideas. Our aim is to help enable high quality visual arts teaching and learning, and we feel that can only happen through a creation, curation and sharing of ideas relating to aspects of creative making and understanding. Ideas excite us, and giving form to those ideas so that others can access them excites us even more.
Having an ear to the ground and being agile enough to both identify and act upon needs and opportunities is the next driver of AccessArt’s work. Where we see a need experienced by pupils, teachers, educators and artists, we enjoy identifying a creative solution.
Finally, through reflection: of what worked, what didn’t work, what is happening on the horizon, and what can we help steer, AccessArt is able to refine our vision of what we need to do next.
Through all these modes: ideas, opportunity and reflection, our position of sitting slightly outside and around (fill space) the users we serve helps us act with freedom and clarity, and enables us to work hard to create a product which is both relevant to and accessible by as many people as possible.
Explore our other Core Values here.
Susan M Coles
June 19, 2023 @ 4:34 pm
what a beautiful illustration…..