Artist Story: Michaela Wetherell

Please give a brief introduction to yourself and your artistic practice

When I was a child I absolutely loved to paint and create. I was very lucky to go to a primary school that really encouraged creativity. We had pupils’ artworks framed and hung around the school, the wall spaces were covered in colourful paper cut-outs, drawings and characters inspired by the books we were reading. School plays about Shakespeare and The Jabberwocky. All this creativity stayed with me until I went to college and actually had to put these skills into a job and realised I really wasn’t very good at it! I absolutely loved being creative but knew my artistic practice was going to be a little more behind the scenes. I enrolled at Northumbria University to do a BA in History of Modern Art, Film and Design to figure out what my creative path would be. Whilst learning I went down to Manchester Art Gallery and saw an exhibition called, ‘Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism’ and it changed everything for me. Seeing these beautifully selected works by incredible women that I wasn’t learning about in uni (I was learning about the men in these women’s lives). I saw these stories and knew this was what I wanted to do, to tell the untold or forgotten stories of women. I guess this was when I figured I wanted to go into curation. To be honest I can’t really remember but I remember vividly seeing this exhibition and wanting to do what they did.

After graduating I started volunteering in the arts, Vane was my first proper volunteering role which was the start of everything. Since finishing volunteering in 2013 I have developed my curatorial career. I co-founded Nasty Women North East, an art and activist group which is a part of the international Nasty Women collective. Extensively exhibited around the North East and worked for Thought Foundation Galley as a curator. Currently, I am working at Platform A Gallery as Marketing and Curating Manager and Director at Pink-Collar Gallery.

Did volunteering at Vane inspire your curatorial practice?

I started volunteering at Vane in 2012 with absolutely no idea what really it meant to be a curator. The very first show I helped on was Jock Mooney’s ‘The Eyes Turn’d Inward for the Nightmare was Real’. Helping at that exhibition was such a great experience of how to install an exhibition and it helped that Jock was super supportive and helpful as I was a total newbie! Since that exhibition, I saw how Vane developed their exhibitions and the behind-the-scenes marketing and the logistics of displaying work, all these things I have taken on board with me. Most importantly Vane has inspired me by showing me what a beautifully crafted exhibition can look like and how the North East has a high calibre of exhibitions which I needed to match. It did take me MANY years to get there but I think I have achieved it.

You base a lot of your work around the North East, why is this location so important to your practice?

Well, I am from the North East, born and raised, and at the start when everyone told me I had to move to London to have a career in the arts I didn’t have two pennies to rub together never mind move to the most expensive city going! Also, I really hated that the North East was seen as somewhere not to inspire to stay or be when we have some fantastic gallery spaces and wonderful creatives all around. Coming from a more working-class background where working in the arts was never seen as a career and totally unattainable I really wanted to prove that you can have a long-lasting career working in a job you love. So it’s important to me to work with artists in the North East and working in amazing venues around the North East. Now that I have been curating exhibitions around the North East for the past six years I want to pay it forward to other North East creatives, be it mentoring or working with local artists, just like Vane and other organisations in Commercial Union House did for me when I first got started.

You recently launched an online gallery called Pink-Collar Gallery. Tell us about the space and what sort of exhibitions do you exhibit.

When the country went into lockdown in 2020, my exhibitions were closed early and the gallery I worked for also closed. I was lucky enough to get some funding to adapt my practice. I used this opportunity to create an online gallery, a space where I could still work and develop relationships with artists. I named the gallery, Pink-Collar Gallery, which is a term that is used for someone working in the care-oriented career field or in fields historically considered to be women’s work. Pink-Collar Gallery is a space where I can do my practice which focuses on my particular passions of highlighting female (under)representation within the arts and the relevance of working-class identity.

The very first exhibition I curated for the gallery was ‘First Night / Last Night’. Work by Teesside-based photographer, Kev Howard. This two-part series of images was documentation of the first night of the Covid-19 virus social lockdown and when the lockdown lifted both on a Saturday evening in Newcastle city centre at the same time between 7-8pm. Kev has documented many demonstrations around the region including Anti Austerity Protest, NHS cuts protests and Anti-Fascist marches. So it seemed fitting for Kev to explore the environment of a time which will be embedded into our social and political history. Since launching the site, I have worked with over 175 artists, commissioned 15 new pieces of work and focused on issues such as mental health, working-class identity and femicide.

What can we see for Pink-Collar Gallery in the near future?

I have a programme of exhibitions throughout 2023 for the online space which will hopefully blend into some pop-up exhibitions around the North East. My dream for the near future is to have a physical permanent space in Sunderland where I can do all things Pink-Collar in a real setting.

You focus your practice on feminist issues and exploring working-class identities. Why have you forced more on social issues?

Not to be too corny but I do believe art is for everyone and art can be used to tell important stories and movements. I found education very hard as a child and all the way through higher education. Not knowing until my late 20s that I am dyslexic and my brain just didn’t work like others. Art has been an amazing tool for me to develop storytelling and express creativity through curating.

When I started my practice as a curator I really wanted to talk about the lack of representation of women's stories in the arts. I started my freelance practice officially in 2016 (many years of volunteering before that) and my first larger project was to highlight the lack of women in museum collections out on display to the public.

Now galleries and museums in the North East such as The Laing and The Hatton Gallery do exhibit more women in their collections but even in 2016 there was a dearth of women on display. Working with Creative Darlington art collection which was situated in the basement of Darlington Library I selected unknown artists and unknown female sitters to tell the stories of these women. No information about these paintings is recorded and I wanted to tell the stories of forgotten women throughout history with these unknown faces as a representation of all women who had been forgotten. I selected contemporary working artists from the region to select one of the unknown women to tell their story, who they could have been, what they enjoyed, or what they might have been thinking. I had a selection of abstraction, portraits and photography alongside the collection.

This theme of representing lost stories about women has been sprinkled throughout my practices. In 2020 I developed an exhibition called ‘CRAFT’ which highlighted how craft has been seen as a feminine hobby and not seen as a contemporary art practice. In 2021 I curated along with the Mexican activist art group Las Iluministas an online gallery and 10 public art commissions both in UK and Mexico to highlight the lack of public awareness of the rise of femicide in the UK and Mexico.

I am currently developing more stories about working-class identity. When the pandemic hit and the arts were literally closed down overnight there were many scared and unsure creatives who didn't know if they had a job after all this was over, and some creatives haven’t and have had to retrain into some other career to finance themselves and their family.

During the lockdown, I did see many conversations about working-class people being seen as a minority and there was an encouragement of more working-class people to apply for opportunities and jobs. Of course, having a diverse range of creatives is a brilliant thing, but how do you prove you’re working class? Is it where you are from, how much money your parents earned, or having a regional accent? And how do you prove that?

In lockdown, I developed an exhibition called, ‘What does it mean to be working class?’. I commissioned five working-class artists from the North East and the North West to explore these themes. One commission by Teesside artist John James Perangie, Me Garden of Eden, was a video piece that attempted to dissect their own working-class identity as a queer artist and a comment on the socioeconomic state of the working classes. Erin Dickson's video piece, Pain in the back of my neck, explores a tongue-in-cheek snapshot of a process known as accent elimination/reduction.

What advice would you give to budding curators?

I would say you do not have to go to uni to have a career as a curator. I can’t lie though, it does help and unfortunately the art world is still snobby when it comes to requirements of higher education. It’s definitely a career you can learn on the job, and what I did was I volunteered at organisations like Vane and developed relationships with incredible people who have been my biggest support system in the arts. From volunteering at Vane I got to know all the other creatives in the Orbis Community at the old Commercial Union House building and I curated my first exhibition, ‘The Dirty Word’ at Ampersand Inventions. This exhibition had a budget of around £20 and the theme of the show was the word ‘feminism’. I invited some local artists and a network of friends to exhibit their work and poems. Creating work myself, I plastered walls with archived feminist slogan placards and created a mean tweet wall highlighting the negativity that surrounds how people talk about feminism online. This exhibition was not my best, but it was the start of my whole career and it taught me you could make mistakes and learn and grow from them. You don’t have to work at a gallery to be a curator, you can have a career hopping around galleries, finding interesting space, meeting incredible artists and developing your own voice by yourself.

Do you have any particular memories of your experience of working with Vane?

I really loved my first experience working on the Jock Mooney show at Vane because it was such a positive experience, learning how to display artwork, and learning from the artist, the opening was an incredible night of celebrations and meeting MANY people who are friends and colleagues today. I truly loved volunteering at Vane and I do believe if I didn’t have such a positive experience I would never have pursued a career in curating because before I found Vane there was a lot of rejection and bad volunteering experiences so I honestly would probably have given it up. So, I’m very grateful for my time there and hopefully one day in the future we can work together on an exhibition.