Bonus: Margate, or ‘Traceyville’

0:00Tracey:This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Wait, this is a soda? Yeah. And it has protein? 10 grams. No sugar? Zero. And it actually tastes good? It's Sky Pop. Sky Pop Protein Soda delivers the refreshing taste you want from a real soda. Crisp and delicious with 10 grams of complete protein, zero sugar, and just 45 calories. So you're not choosing between great taste and real benefits. You're getting both in every sip. Sky Pot Protein Soda. Reach for the sky. Get your Sky Pot Protein Soda now at Target, Walmart, or Kroger. Ruthie's Table 4, presented by Sky.

0:41Do you go out in Margate? I go out in Margate, yeah. We've got some really good restaurants in Margate. I really want to come down. You have your own, too. Yeah, well, it's not my restaurant. It's my property, but it's at TK Studios, at my studios, and it's called The Perfect Place to Grow and it's named after a piece of my work, which I was sort of hesitant about, but everyone seems to. I was going to ask you, it's a really long name, but people, and it's a trainee kitchen and it's for long-term young unemployed, refugees. Actually, the refugees tend to do a lot of the teaching with the cooking as well.

1:21But, you know, it's really amazing. and then and also people with learning difficulties um and so far i think i can't remember i think they've put about 35 people into full time employment which is amazing and what they do is if someone's interested in in poultry they learn everything about chickens they go to the farms the free range farms they learn how to pluck they do everything right from the source right to the table so it's pretty amazing and it's actually it's a really good go financially good going concern it's it's paying its way and we've had quite a number of well-known chefs who have come down and yeah and cooked with everybody and put on like jose pizarro came and did a lunch and a dinner where he you know for free and he provided all the produce as well which is amazing so for people in market who can't come up to london to go to dinner it was like a fantastic occasion so tell me about the refugee cooking well they do a really amazing um um like fantastic like um uh curries and different spice dishes different i'm not going to name them all but because i can't but it's really like very niche and very unique and not not just plain yeah cooking it's really fantastic and they actually did a cooked for my um they cooked for my dinner at white cube for my show last year yeah so for for i think it was for 190 people wow because that is the identity you know if you think that you leave a country you take the food with you don't you you take the food that you've been cooking in your country and then you come to yeah but what i i sort of think is that um you know all the well people coming to people who come to this country they have something to bring something to offer something we don't have can you imagine if we lived in london and there were no restaurants other than british restaurants you know that's what or you know that's what refugees that's what people bring yeah they bring excitement they teach us how to dance they teach us how to cook they teach us how to do it culturally the world's a big place culinary delights and food of course it's going to be global and international There's no other way of doing it.

3:34So at the school, going back to your training, and then tell me about the art side of it. The art side, we've got artist residency where we have up to 10 people that come for a 14-month course. We have usually about maybe 1 ,000 people apply for 10 places, and the criteria is that they must be of a postgraduate level. So they don't have to have done a postgraduate, but they must be of that level. and they put in an application. The application they have to put in a two-minute, maximum two-minute film of them talking about themselves and their work and they put in 10 images and they write 500 words about their work and that's how everybody applies.

4:16So now we do it for 14 months. So it's a full year and two months holiday. So the two months holiday is three weeks at Christmas, three weeks at Easter and then two weeks somewhere else. But the studios are open. So people don't have to, they don't have to go on holiday. They can carry on working if they like, but we encourage them to stop painting and do other things. And yeah, and the whole year is every day. The studios are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If they have a part-time job, they're encouraged to do it on a Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. And Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday is the days that we have visitors come in.

5:01tutorials lectures seminars, I teach whatever. You're teaching, how do you find you the teaching? Well I love teaching When did you start teaching? I started teaching of art I know First place I taught was I think was at the maybe the Royal College of Art in printmaking and then I taught at Goldsmiths, Royal College of Art Royal Academy done big lectures in different places but um I like where I'm teaching now because I chose the people that I'm teaching so I can build up a very good rapport with them and also very honest one so that they can really take criticism very well and they're tough and this lot that we've got are really really really good they're just on it all the time and they're they're they surprise me so it's exciting and it's really international and we got people from India, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Mexico, Brazil and it's free.

6:10Yeah. It's all they have to do is find their accommodation and and that's it pay for their accommodation and food and in Margate it's quarter of the price of what it is in London. Yeah and so they and the people who teach their other artists are they all artists yeah and top international artists as well and not just artists we have people from museums we have people from the uh we just simon shaw just did a project from sotheby's and and they did a fake they did a like pretend auction with him which apparently was really brilliant really good fun we have art historians come in we also have life drawing once a week We have a performance artist in residence, and they do projects with everyone.

6:57And also we have a professional artist studio, so we have about 15 artists that work in the studios. So they're working artists. Yeah, working artists as well, and they work alongside, do things. Like Lindsay Mendick opens up her studio, and they do ceramic projects with her. other people do drawing projects or i know it's it's interesting it's what happens when they leave do you know yeah do you know um the last from the last lot that left um i think out of a majority of them are showing some are doing exceptionally well i mean phenomenally well two of them are just like one of them bianca she won the women artist award she's shown with flowers gallery she had a sellout show um Lola Strongbrett she's been showing internationally people there's a queue for her paintings um yeah it's all very not Anna Parkhouse I just put in my show with uh Carl Friedman gallery um no they're really all doing well and this lot they're all so many galleries are interested in them wanting to work with them so we try to say it's amazing do you think it was for fun if you'd had that chance to go to your school when you were starting out did that have affected do you think your things were different then I went to the Royal College of Art yeah it was pretty good yeah I mean but you weren't expected to go to the Royal College of Art and then have a gallery yeah you know this was I left in 1989 my master's so things were really different then you know all galleries have Hessian wallpaper and tiny little glasses of red wine and it was it was really different it wasn't how it is now at all so um when you say how it is now what is how it is now well I think people go to college now and they expect to like have a one person show the day they leave and have a sellout show and it isn't going to be like that you know where do you think that expectation comes from though do you think it comes my generation yeah yeah yeah yeah The success of your generation.

9:08The success of my generation, and people think that that's how it is, and it actually really isn't like that. And then also, for a lot of people in my generation, they had that immediate success, and then after that, it was really hard work keeping up the... And I'll say my generation, but I'm a little bit older than a lot of them, and also I left my Master's in 1989 at the Royal College of Art, A lot of my contemporaries went to Goldsmiths and just did a degree. They didn't do a Master's. I see, so the YBAs, yeah. Yeah, the YBAs, yeah. I know. Yeah, OBAs, yeah, on British Artists, yeah.

10:06Tracey:Wait, this is a soda? Yeah. And it has protein? 10 grams. No sugar? Zero. And it actually tastes good? It's Sky Pop. Sky Pop Protein Soda delivers the refreshing taste you want from a real soda. Crisp and delicious with 10 grams of complete protein, zero sugar, and just 45 calories. So you're not choosing between great taste and real benefits. You're getting both in every sip. Sky Pop Protein Soda. Reach for the sky. Get your Sky Pop Protein Soda now at Target, Walmart, or Kroger. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.