Denise Proctor on this year's NOISE Festival
Denise Proctor, CEO of NOISE Festival on how the biennial charity event is helping young creative people make the most of their talents
The NOISE Festival charity was set up in 2004, to find ways to help creative talent from all backgrounds to be rewarded and succeed in the creative industries. Over the last decade, the NOISE Charity's ethos has really remained that simple: we continue to strive to offer alternative and informal routes for individuals and groups to boost their chances of achieving success. NOISE focuses on talent, as a counterweight to the all too familiar nepotism and unfair advantages that a postcode or the bank of mum and dad can provide. The requirement for unpaid placements prevents so many young talented people from achieving their potential, and in many cases puts a halt to aspiring artists and creative minds across the UK and Europe. If you have creative talent and the drive to succeed, NOISE believes you have exactly the same right to progress as anybody else. We showcase the best, undiscovered creative talent and provide routes into industry that are positive and debt free.
Liam Fawcett & Elaine Constantine
NOISE Festival 2014 is currently open for entries; the deadline is the 31st May 2014. We have opened up some new categories this year including Comedy, and Enterprise, and we aim to get as wide a pool of talent involved as possible. The 2014 NOISE Curators include some fantastic names that really are offering career-changing opportunities for the talent they chose. Over the summer, the curators shortlist the entries and the chosen creatives go forward for exhibitions, media coverage, and in some cases there will be professional/amateur collaborations, paid work placements and personal mentorship by these curators. NOISE Festival 2014 will be announcing the curators' selected talent and running nationwide events this autumn to showcase them.
Leah Capaldi & Tim Marlow
The biennial NOISE Festival is a celebration of all the work submitted through the www.NOISEfestival.com portfolios. For each festival we invite new creative talent to enter their work to be rated by a panel of industry professionals, the 'NOISE Curators'. Noise Festival has attracted guest curators including Zaha Hadid, Norman Rosenthal, Peter Saville, Wayne Hemingway and Tom Dixon. For NOISE Festival 2014 our panel includes architect Nicholas Grimshaw, musician Brian Eno, illustrator Gerald Scarfe and fashion designer Giles Deacon. These names are iconic figures in their respective creative fields, and offer our festival entrants not only their endorsement for selected work, but in many cases have been more than happy to offer work placements and mentorship. As a group, they recognise the barriers to starting a career in the creative industries (and succeeding against the odds!), and are therefore equipped to advise the next generation on overcoming difficulties and breaking through.
Matthew Johnson & Gerald Scarfe
We have supported more than 18,000 emerging artists, and brokered paid placements in leading creative companies internationally as well as helping artists continue their routes through greater qualifications. There seems to be a myth in this country that the next generation always has it easy, is spoilt, have had their hands held for too long, and so on. This is an unbelievably negative way to look upon what is our future and makes no sense whatsoever for greater economic growth. More importantly, shouldn't we be doing all we can to support and help these young people? What's the point in heralding the British creative industries as vitally important to the country's economic future, and worrying about the huge numbers of unemployed young people, if we're not going to help them by supporting them into jobs, celebrating their creative talents, and breaking down the traditional barriers for different social and economic backgrounds?
Mustafa Yasser Raee & Sir Nicholas Grimshaw
The NOISE Festival project will continue to be committed to supporting emerging creative talent, and we hope as many aspiring creatives will get involved in the last few weeks of our call for entries to the NOISE Festival 2014 as possible! So if you are, or know, talented young people who are frustrated in their efforts to get ahead, encourage them to submit their work, free.
Our website www.NOISEfestival.com runs as a virtual community for creatives across the arts, to set up portfolios of their work. The main hub of activity is this portfolio website which showcases talent through online galleries and signposts our live events, as well as providing networks and peers to collaborate with, access to mentorship from leading industry professionals, has job placementopportunities, plus ongoing NOISE projects, gigs, conferences and exhibitions all designed to enhance young people's portfolios/CVs by validating their informal learning and activities.
