1-2-1 mentoring with Kaleidoscope Network Staff

Once again, as part of the Kaleidoscope Network, we are offering 1-2-1 mentoring this June with staff from the other partner organisations around the country. These will be an hour each, on Zoom, and offer a chance for advice / feedback / virtual studio visit / general chat about art practice / someone to bounce ideas around with – it’s up to you to set the agenda for what you’d like to get out of the session.

Here’s the three mentors and the specific dates and times they are offering.

Thomas Griffiths (BLOC): Wednesday 4th June, 11am – 12pm

Maya Wallis (NewBridge): Friday 6 June, 11am–12pm

Olivia Jones (Spike): Wednesday 11 June, 11am-12pm

To apply, please respond to these three questions via Google Form (LINK)

Tell us the specific person you’d like to chat with

Why you’d like to chat with them?

What you’d like to talk about, relating your ideas and practice to their job and experience?

You don’t need to send images or weblinks – if selected you’ll be able to email them directly to your mentor before your 1-2-1 session.

We will select three EOP members who best identify what they want to get out of the session and why the mentor they’ve chosen is relevant.

Thomas Griffiths (Meanwhile Space + Membership Facilitator, Bloc Projects) Thomas Griffiths is a Sheffield based artist and curator, and a recent MFA graduate of Manchester School of Art. Influenced by industrial artefacts and public/hidden spaces, their practice reimagines and reinscribes commonplace objects and symbols with unexpected interpretations.
Alongside their artistic practice, they are a co-director and curator of GLOAM, an artist-led grassroots gallery and studio space in Sheffield that platforms emerging artists and supports their development locally and regionally.

Maya Wallis is the Bookshop and Reading Room Coordinator at NewBridge which means managing the day to day running of the bookshop and library space, as well as programming events related to both sites. She’s interested in supporting artists to interact with bookshop and library spaces through writing, research, publishing and print practices.

Maya is also an artist whose practice is rooted in blending writing and visual arts into some kind of ‘aesthetic fiction’. She co-runs Albion Row Studios alongside Hannah Christy and Sabina Sallis.

Olivia Jones is the Senior Technician at Spike Island in Bristol. Olivia has 11 years of technical experience in Spike Island’s galleries, and has been leading on exhibition installs since 2020. The essence of their job is creative problem solving, turning ideas and plans into reality.

Being an art tech is varied and rarely repetitive. Olivia and Spike Island’s team of freelance technicians work closely with the Programme Team, exhibiting artists and visiting curators to realise exhibitions and commissions from initial ideas, through to 3D modelling using SketchUp, and fabrication and installation on site. Olivia has overseen monumental exhibitions including, Lucy Stein: Wet Room, where they installed a functioning bathtub and sink in the gallery, alongside hand-painted wall tiles exploring western esoteric traditions; Candice Lin: Pigs and Poison, which included a life-size trebuchet that launched cannonballs made of lard and bone black pigment at the gallery walls; and Eric Baudelaire and Alvin Curran: When There Is No More Music to Write, where they installed a self-playing piano suspended from the ceiling.

Alongside tech work Olivia is also an artist and has a studio at Spike Island. Working predominantly between sculptural and drawn processes, she creates works that explore the characteristics and potential of materials, objects and phenomena within landscapes.