By Rebecca Hunter and Victoria Kortekaas
This week, New Wortley Community Centre has a wonderful reason to celebrate.
Colleague and friend, asset based community development worker Victoria Kortekaas, is snagging an MA from Leeds Arts University.
A New Wortley Community spokesperson congratulated Victoria. They said: “We’re over the moon! A massive high-five to Victoria, and thanks a bunch for all the magic you bring to the centre.”
Victoria’s story
I graduated with a first-class degree in Visual Communications in 2013. Since then I’ve worked as a freelance artist running workshops in communities and running my own community arts practice The Highrise Project CIC with fellow artist Dr Louise Atkinson.
I chose to pursue a MA to focus on developing a better understanding of my own artistic practice and to develop the skills to move towards exhibiting my work as well as continuing to support people to tell their stories through art.
The focus of my research during my M.A was how communities make an impact on spaces through the things they create, do and leave behind in public spaces and the theories behind this such as Thing Theory, Materialism (what things are and how they impact the world) and Rhythm Analysis (how spaces are shaped by and shape people through every day acts).
During my studies I realised that these things fascinate me because I see them as a way to connect to and understand people and the world around us but also, they bring me what Deb Dana, Author and Clinical Social Worker calls Glimmers. A moment of joy and calm that takes me away from the world around me.
The past two years have been hard work and I have had to learn a lot about myself both as a person and an Artist. The hardest thing was understanding to be true to my own work and not worry about if it will be successful or popular.
My creative practice aims to recreate those moments or curiosity, wonder or joy I experience when finding a thing in a public space. I collect photographs of these things to make playful photographic archives through traditional book binding skills and paper engineering created from digital photography.
All my work is hand made and is designed to be held and explored by the viewer. My work isn’t influenced by any one artist but by the things that I find in public space however I do like the works of Collete Fu and aspire to in the future create complex pop-up sculptural forms like hers, that reflect the culture of the communities I live and work within.
Working with communities means a lot to me, as a child I had first hand experience of living below the poverty line, feeling like an outsider and having a complex family homelife. I had my children very young, left school with only a few qualifications and had few slip ups along the way.
I want to give people the support I received that helped me to move forward and feel confident in myself. I love communities and people and I think this is reflected in both my creative work and my work at the centre. I believe that everyone has something to give.
Now I’ve graduated I aim to continue to develop my skills and to exhibit my work in exhibition with an aim to one day having a solo exhibition.
In the near future I will be working on a Augmented Reality Heritage trail as part of The Highrise Project working with NWCC’s History Group, Meeting Point, young people and The Leeds Industrial Museum. My artistic dream would be to work on a project with the community to codesign and create giant public pop up sculpture in public spaces.
I’m really excited to be graduating and look forward to potentially carrying on my academic career in the future and developing myself as an artist researcher.
- New Wortley Community Centre can be contacted here.
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