Creature Encounter spent two days working with 6 classes of children to help NPT Arts celebrate 10 years of community events. In those 10 years the Community Arts Team have delivered projects to 30,000 people. I still remember the times when visiting artists came to my school hall to share their world, their experience shaped my perception of what was possible. There is a direct line between those experiences and the day my Father came home from fixing the switch board at film studio, telling us around the dinner table "that some people just play for a living." Across a lifetime these references build to create a belief, in the possibility of picking up a thread of interest and following it doggedly to create a career. I want offer the children we speak to, the sense of credible possibility that meeting a practising artist professional can instil. Because if I had not believed it was possible, I would have given up long before I made it a reality and I only knew it was possible when those arts professionals visited my school. From that point on every artist I met became an example, and every one who had packed their dreams away to enter the "real world" became a warning. Community arts projects changed my life because they showed me that "unique is always valuable," which is never more true than in times of economic uncertainty.
