Author: rachael

Sarah Pickthall meets Sally Booth

In the first month of the COVID-19 contagion, I dropped visual artist and Sync alumni, Sally Booth, an email to see where she was up to in isolation and whether she would be up for a catch-up on all things cancelled and on what it’s like pressing the re-start button on her career.

Sally wrote an article about her practice for our Sync programme back in 2010.  A decade on from the Sync Leadership programme in 2010, Sally has gone from strength-to-strength and has been in regular employment as an artist and facilitator, returning to the UK just a few days before lockdown from a successful cultural exchange in Chicago with Shape Arts.

From Edges and Extremes across Shetland and Cornwall with showcases and performances at the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, to sketch-booking on the London tube, her portfolio career has combined commissions and training around the social model of disability.  As a regular trainer for VocalEyes, Sally explores and shares the depth of her experience of visual impairment, bringing art and culture alive through audio description.

Speaking together in the fourth week of lockdown in England, Sally shared that the solitude was lovely to start with and very familiar to her as an artist, but after a few days, the impact of losing all foreseeable work and the impending isolation ‘hit home hard.’  My email to reconnect led Sally to address the digital gaps in her day-to-day routine. Whilst her website won a Jodi Award for Accessibility in 2009, her lack of access to social media, and more importantly digital meet-ups and hangouts, so relied upon by us all, was painfully thin.

In preparation for our Sync Zoom interview, with the help of the neighbours, Sally managed to download Zoom and Otter.ai apps onto on her iPad, creating captions and audio of our conversations. This will help with captioning the short film we made and she will continue to use this tech, despite its limitations. Sally has even been doing audio descriptions of her pictures over the fence.

Together we were able to have a joyful conversation, exploring a new leadership metaphor that explains very clearly the experience of having to start-over a childhood game she played with her father, called ‘Pick-up Sticks’.  We also spoke of intimacy; that we will both miss the nuances of working closely with people, be that in training, coaching or at a gallery. We both remarked that despite this, we had in our virtual reminiscing together rekindled our lovely rapport and laughed our socks off.  You can watch the video of our conversation with an Audio description introduction for the film underneath.

When Won Young Kim took part in Sync Korea, he was exploring a dilemma: that of needing to continue to practice law to meet the responsibility of supporting his family – but with his heart very much taken up with developing his artistic practice. Since that time, using a simple metaphor, he has managed to blend both ambitions, honouring both his values and his desire to make great artwork and challenge ideas and thinking around aesthetics in South Korea and beyond.

Sarah Pickthall talks with Won Young Kim

Meeting online in May, Won and I spoke of the impact of Covid in our respective cities, me in Brighton and Won in Seoul. This hadn’t been the first time we had met up together since running Sync in Korea in 2018, the last time being to work on a profile of Disability Arts in South Korea for Disability Arts International in 2018.

Won shared that there had been a lot of disabled activists challenging the government and some successful and significant movement in moving people out of institutions during the pandemic, ensuring disabled people had the right to be treated in hospitals alongside everyone else. This had felt like a huge achievement and a step forward politically in South Korea.

Law has been part of Won’s life for many years, but there has always been the underlying compulsion to make artwork, be that theatre, dance or live art. At the time of Sync in 2018, Won reminded me that I had just simply asked him one question: why? Why wasn’t he able to do both? What was stopping him? This simple question was the start of him finding a way to bring both interests into play, culminating in some acclaimed performances in Seoul in 2019.

“The artworks described a piece of fictitious law – ‘An Act of Love and Friendship,’” he told me, and as part of this performance he told the audience about this law. Alongside this, Won made a significant step to get out of his chair, something he had never done in public before. “I was worried at the time, that audiences would see me doing this as ‘a freak show.”

On the contrary the work was felt by many to be visceral and powerful but not in a patronising way. The ‘move’ was received well with people quite active across popular mainstream culture, lauding it and his work being nominated for an award.

Won went on to talk of the ‘big trousers’ that he has over many years worn, to assume a so-called ‘normal form.’ It seemed this was important for him to appear a certain way when out in the world from a very early age and through his legal career.  An artistic colleague and friend drew his attention to the performance work of UK dance artist and performer, David Toole, someone who has used his physicality in bold and exciting ways in a career that has not shied away from the public gaze.

Won can now more easily see himself pursuing his performance work, with plans temporarily on hold, to do workshops with choreographer Adam Benjamin when restrictions are lifted and international travel is possible again.  This fed into our conversation about the Sync metaphor he chose during the course in Seoul in 2018, which I had remembered as ‘The Game of Go.’  Won reminded me that it wasn’t the game itself but the simple ‘ordinary’ stone that was the metaphor.  

As disabled people, when we are in the confines of our own spaces, away from the gaze of others, getting out of a chair or moving in a way that suits us isn’t something we necessarily think about. However, how we reveal ourselves in public can be a very different matter, as we bid to conform with what society deems acceptable.   

This has now extended into how we show up in virtual spaces too, and the potential is there for us all to be a bit more flexible and relaxed in this respect. Here’s an article on the Softer Edges of Online-ness.

Sofya Gollan had so many credits and achievements to her name when she joined the Sync Aus programme in 2015; yet she felt she had hit a place and time in her life where she wasn’t progressing. Even if we have credits and accreditations, the subtle and not so subtle barriers in society continue to discriminate against our Deaf and disabled professional progression – and stop us in our tracks.

Sarah Pickthall talks with Sofya Gollan

I met with Sofya online in May to discuss the impact of Sync way back then in helping her shed her skin and think again. She is now holding a position of authority as Screen Investment Manager at Screen NSW. Sofya and I share a history of sorts – our involvement in inclusive television. For myself, this meant working for 10 years as part of the Art Attack Team in the UK with their ‘sister’ project ZZZap, which was designed to include deaf children along with mainstream programming for children in the UK. I wrote scripts for the show and my hands, now retired, were The Handymen. Sofya, quite early in her career, joined the presenter team at Play School in Australia and has been involved in the programme for over 30 years alongside a career in media.

An award-winning director and writer of documentary and drama films, Sofya’s films have been screened in major international festivals over the decade. One of her most recent short films, GIMPSEY, which she wrote and directed, was nominated for an ACCTA Award in 2017 in the Social Shorts and is featured at the beginning of the film we made when we spoke together on Zoom.  

Loving a leadership metaphor, and that being a part of what we explore in a Sync programme, I asked her to recall the one she chose all those years ago. She was unable to recall it, which in itself was quite funny.  Yet choosing a leadership metaphor doesn’t mean you have to stick with it. 

In fact we can choose different metaphors and analogies that reflect where we are at any one time in our professional careers. Our conversation continued with a focus on Sync being something that allowed her to shed her skin like a snake. 

Watch the video of our conversation – including short clips of Sofya’s film Chlorine Dreams (1998, 10mins.) A young girl finds a ghost-like boy living in her pool.

It’s not just the deafness but the intersectional experience of gender identity and being a person with a disability, she explained. The industry is still so biased in so many ways.  The blend of being deaf and a woman was hitting hard at the time, so how did Sync help? ‘Well, I think it was in our coaching that we explored the idea of saying yes to everything.’  I remembered the coaching conversation we’d had at the time. 

Sometimes adopting a different strategy for a while can bring an unforeseen opportunity. Putting herself ‘out there’ was not new to Sofya but in the face of rejection and doors slamming, choosing this with a lighter, less defeated strategy, of saying ‘yes, why not?,’ felt different. With Sofya well known to audiences in Australia, she already had the natural ability to put herself out there, but driving this in a different way. 

Shedding the skin of old tactics and bringing in the new paid off.  The first opportunity she said yes to, ‘can be directly attributed to getting me to where I am now’ she shared. It was that simple.  

In her role now, investing in other people, she is responsible for the end-to-end management of screen content that ranges from international co-productions to stand-alone short films. Not only that, as a creative, she still holds a passion for narrative development in VR and is making her own work shedding the skin of other people’s thinking with a focus on new lived experiences in compelling story lines. 

Sync allows you to rethink things, gives you the time, the space and the attention to refresh yourself and renew. So why not you? Whether you are part of Sync now or are thinking of applying to be so, our plans are to share insights and activity in the weeks and months ahead. That’ll be about taking a different tack, shedding your own skin, breaking through and seeing what emerges in these very taxing times.