Date: Thursday 30 July
Time: 10:00 BST
Duration: 1.5 hrs
Fee: £2
Graham Dolphin – How I Learned to Call Myself an Artist After 30 Years of Making Art
Why was I born in such a rubbish town? Where is the culture? How do I get out?
In this talk, Graham Dolphin looks back at thirty years of making art – not the polished version, but the real one. He starts where he started: a Midlands town he was desperate to leave, with no obvious route into culture or art. He talks about arriving at art college with no skills and even less confidence, discovering an instant, if slightly bewildering, sense of not fitting in (“why is no one into the same music as me?”), and slowly – through no money and a lot of friends – finding the beginnings of a community.
From there, Graham traces how that early community became a support system he has spent decades trying to hold on to, how life inevitably gets in the way, and how ego – so often treated as a dirty word in art – has actually been a useful friend along the way. The talk closes with his thoughts on teaching, and what it means to pass on everything he’s learned to the next generation of artists.
It’s a personal talk, but one with wider relevance: a frank look at access, resilience and community in the art world, from someone who has made a career out of persistence rather than predictability.
Graham Dolphin is a British artist, born in 1972 in Stafford, UK, who studied painting at Bath School of Art. Represented by Vane, Newcastle, he has been exhibiting his work internationally for over 30 years, with exhibitions and commissions at institutions including BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, the ICA, National Portrait Gallery, the Grand Palais, Somerset House and Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, alongside galleries across the UK, US and Europe. He is known for his meticulous, often laborious approach to making, working across drawing, sculpture, sound and text. Graham currently lives and works in Newcastle upon Tyne, where, alongside his own practice, he teaches and supports the next generation of artists.
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