Hi, I’m Zoë an academic, activist, collecter, curator, designer- maker, researcher, overthinker and aspiring overachiever.
I’ve made it my business and job to upset the status quo and fiercely advocate for students and graduates. Helping them figure out what they value, what they want to do and how to make that a sustainable creative practice. I came up with this slightly wild idea – The Atterbury flat, and here we are!
This project has been a long time coming. Not just the year we’ve spent quietly commissioning and sourcing everything. But even long before that. In fact it’s quite hard to not give you my life story in an attempt to establish where it all really started!
I’ll spare you that, and what I will say is that I’ve been making and building things my whole life. I perhaps delusionally believe I can do almost anything physical. Useless at languages but excellent at observing processes and then replicating them. I’m obsessed with context, terrible at concise and happiest in complexity. I love to solve problems and have a really strong sense of justice (thanks AUDHD)
This tends to mean being unable to not take on the burden of fixing something I’ve observed that isn’t working.
I studied 3D design at Camberwell (now FPD at Chelsea) and when I graduated I was all too aware of how hard it is to find opportunities to sell your work as a fresh grad. So of course in 2013 I secured a shop unit in central London for LDF, negotiated the space for free and secured a small pot of funding to set up a pop up shop for the duration of the festival, selling the work or 30+ up and coming student and grad designers. Employed students as sales assistants, ran workshops and screened films in the shop basement. We had 15 minutes to measure the space and then had to go away and do the entire fit out without visiting again!
I saw the struggles my pals and classmates had getting things manufactured in the UK and how frustrated they were, so in 2014 I secured another small pot of funding and organised a bike tour of London manufacturers with Tokyo Bikes for LDF.
Are you seeing a theme? It might sound a bit negative to have this ability to spot problems or injustices. But it feels quite magical to me to fix them. I really like solutions! To see the birdseye view, the breadth, but to also be able to simultaneously drill down into the detail and minutia. That’s my happy place.
And that’s exactly what the Atterbury flat is. A culmination of years of working in professional practice and enterprise education. But with that same dna of being able to identify a problem but see a little glimmer, a little opportunity I simply can’t ignore.
In this case the problems, or perhaps my questions were:
Why don’t we collect value and celebrate other outcomes in the same way we do Fine Art? Why do we keep paying external contractors to design our spaces when we have incredible students and graduates who can do it!
The answer, the Atterbury flat, a living/ live-in Archive….