Davy and Kristin McGuire first met in University in 2008
where they began taking on small, freelance projects and, in their words, “…it
sort of snowballed from project's realizing we need to start a company properly
to do bigger budgets etc. and it’s now 11 years later!”
Studio McGuire moved to Hull and wanted to rearrange their
business, something they felt a little bit in the dark about. Davy commented “We’d
moved locations, and we wanted to sort of restructure our business—we’ve always
been artists first I guess, so we’ve seen things from a self-employed point of
view and never really got to look down at the nitty gritty of running a
business. We worked from project to project, rather than having longer term
strategies or understanding fully how companies work.”
It was around this time, April 2018, that they began working
with Creative ENRG, attending workshops and beginning to get a wider
perspective on how a business runs. Davy said that more than anything Creative
ENRG helped them to “just have a sound idea of what we are, what we’re
doing, where we’re going… To have a fundamental structure to understand us as
artists running a business as a separate entity to ourselves. Because often
with art, it becomes so much a part of you, so much a part of what you do that
the financial and structural ways of managing that support the work best are
often neglected.”
Studio McGuire have exhibited, sold, published and screened
their work internationally and their critically acclaimed theatrical projects
have been invited to tour to more than 60 different countries over 4
continents. Their Hull based projects include Still Lives for the Urban
Legends event on Whitefriargate commissioned by Absolutely Cultured and Micropolis
at Springhead Pumping Station commissioned by Hull2017.
Reflecting on his time with ENRG, Davy commented “It’s
been a really good resource for the city, for new businesses - for people
working in the arts sector especially, who tend to have businesses not because
they want to make money, but because they want to be artists and keep in
control of looking after the financial aspect of it … There’s a lot of skills
in being a successful artist that are not about art and those are things that
I’ve really learned a lot more about.”
Artist Website: www.studiomcguire.com
For more information about Creative ENRG visit our website
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