Research Journeys with Helen Bart (Journalist and Associate Producer of Small Axe)

I had a great conversation with Helen Bart yesterday. Helen is a journalist who spent years working for Newsnight and more recently spent 3 years researching Black British histories and stories as part of the development process for Steve McQueen’s Small Axe film series. She gave me great insights into what it is to really follow threads and culminate research and it was reassuring to hear how long that process actually took before it really resulted in anything concrete. She made great points about the amount of enquiry she made into stories or subjects that actually went nowhere in the end but how even in doing so there had been value in learning the stories as well as developing a keener eye for what should be kept and what needed to go. I know these are things reiterated in Applied Imagination also and that I just need to remember and listen to it. I think there is a part of me that holds onto the idea that the limited time and resources I have mean I have to be sure everything sticks and that isn’t the right approach at all and in fact when I examine things it isn’t really what I do in practice either

One avenue of thought (amongst many) my brilliant conversation with Helen has me traversing is the idea of finding some one, or a couple of people, who are maybe in the same fields and a bit further down the road than me  and basically begging them to mentor me?!?! What I find so hard with working on my own is never really having anyone to bounce the ideas off who has some of the same experience. I have my working partner Olga, who I love and is my go to for these things usually, but she’s also in the same situation as me and has her own curation MA to worry about now too. I know I have my MAAI tutors and I shall lean on them more I hope as we gradually go offline ( I think I have institutional authority issues I’ve not quite dealt with yet !! ) There’s a part of me there that doesn’t quite compute that I can do exactly that, lean on them, when in the past tutors and teachers haven’t really fostered that relationship or made themselves available so it’s a new path to tread for me also. Anyway, point being, maybe I should look for a mentor of sorts ?!? Helen talked about how every few weeks she would meet with Steve and he’d be all, keep going with this, maybe lose that, what about this etc etc and it sounded so great to have someone you could just bounce off and who had a bit of a greater perspective on what was gonna work. 

As I write this though I am also realising that I need to be doing that for myself also. I sound like I just want someone to tell me what to do which is both true and wholly untrue at the same time!!!! Bloody hell. Going round in circles.