Sally-Ann Wilkinson is the director of Wild in Art and director of Liverpool Discovers, which is a trail of 13 art installations that have been placed across the city. This is her working day
7am: Up and about. I’m lucky not to have to join the commuter madness and can be quite proud that my carbon footprint is kept at a minimum as my home doubles up as the Wild in Art Northern office. However, that does mean that I’m checking my emails as soon as I get up.
I spend most of my week out and about. Today, I’m off to Liverpool for three days, but before I do, I’m taking care of Wild in Art general business, so that I can focus on Liverpool Discovers while I’m in Liverpool.
8.30am: Catch up phone call to my business partner, Charlie Langhorne, at the beginning of the day – he’s off to Bournemouth and Bristol today to work on our two summer events.
9.30am: My colleagues Duncan, education officer, and Tracy, finance manager, arrive. We have a staff meeting to look at priorities and tasks for the next two days while I’m out of the office. We are preparing for the Education Show in Birmingham and Duncan is leading on this.
11am: Drive from Derbyshire to Liverpool. It takes about 90 minutes and it is an opportunity to get creative. In the office there are emails to send and phone calls to make, so it is good to have some peace and think about what needs to be done for our next UK exhibition and school project.
1pm: Catch up with Jo Pocock, director of Liverpool Lantern Company and artistic director of Liverpool Discovers, one-to-one before we go into the team meeting. We’ve a lot to discuss regarding the artists and how the exhibition is developing. The exhibition is an opportunity for the artists to showcase their creativity and for us to deliver a fantastic exhibition to the people of Liverpool and beyond.
1.30pm: Jo and I are joined by the small team that is responsible for bringing Liverpool Discovers to the streets. Our aim is that our events are not only regarded as fantastic art events but that they respond economically to a city’s needs.
Jo works exclusively on the artistic programme while I focus on what I call the “wrap around” for the event – the PR and marketing plan to ensure that we get good buy-in on a local, national and international level.
Among today’s agenda items are logistics, a key and significant element of bringing art onto the streets. Sandra, the event’s production manager, has been working exhaustively with Liverpool City Council and the artists to create an installation plan which she presents to us.
We sign off on the Trail Map – finally, after months of planning and an intensive time of proof reading, we are ready to press the button for the printers.
4pm: Good meeting with Merseytravel, about how best we can exploit the sponsorship and associated benefits. Sponsorship is a very important part of our funding mix, and I think the private sector brings an important dimension to our events. It takes commitment from us to make this happen and it’s something I feel strongly about.
For whatever reason a company sponsors the arts, they still have to defend it to their stakeholders, so it’s important that we deliver benefits of association accordingly. Good things happen when there’s a positive relationship between an arts organisation and sponsor.
6pm: Staying over, so check into my hotel. I boot up the laptop and start wading through the emails that I’ve not had a chance to respond to during the day. Bringing art to a city’s streets involves many key partnerships and so there are a lot of people that need to be brought up to speed on any new developments.
