Q&A: Katy Morrison, founding Director of PINK, on artist development, grassroots spaces and building sustainable creative futures

We caught up with Katy Morrison, Artist, Access Support Worker, Curator, Consultant, Mentor and Founding Director of PINK, an independent arts organisation in Stockport. As a member of our Artist Advisory Board, Katy discusses the importance of grassroots arts spaces, what meaningful artist development looks like, and how we can create more sustainable and supportive conditions for artists to thrive.

PINK is an independent arts organisation in Stockport bringing together affordable artist studios, gallery and event spaces, and an artist-development programme. We support artists over time, giving them space to test ideas, take creative risks and sustain their practice.

PINK began in 2019 because, in many ways, I needed it myself. I’m working class, originally from Stoke-on-Trent, and I’ve never held a formal institutional role or worked in a gallery I didn’t create. For seventeen years I worked full-time in hospitality while developing a curatorial practice alongside it. I didn’t have access to the spaces or opportunities I needed to test ideas, so I started creating them for myself.

In 2023 I left hospitality and self-funded PINK’s move into Hilton House. We started with one floor and now occupy five, growing from 5 studio holders to 46 and developing dedicated spaces for visual art, music, theatre and dance.

PINK grew out of my curatorial practice, but it is no longer synonymous with me. We now have a team and a community of artists shaping what it becomes. What began from my own lack of access has become a broader question: how do we create the conditions artists need to develop and sustain a practice?

It allows artists to move between making, learning, experimenting, collaborating and presenting work without those things being separated from one another. What we do is artist development, and I think of this as an ecology rather than a sequence of professional opportunities. The different parts of PINK feed into each other, so relationships, knowledge and opportunities can accumulate as a practice changes.

That also means an artist’s relationship with PINK doesn’t have to begin or end with a single project. There are multiple ways in and multiple next steps, which allows development to happen over time rather than being tied to one opportunity or outcome. For me, that is where the idea of an ecology becomes important: the aim is to create conditions in which different parts of a practice can feed one another and where something can continue to develop beyond the thing that first brought someone through the door.

That has also made me increasingly interested in moving beyond ‘resilience’ as the ambition for artists and organisations. Resilience can too easily mean becoming better at surviving difficult conditions. I’m more interested in words like ‘fertility’ and ‘fermenting’; creating enough space, time, resources, trust and exchange for artists to do more than survive. Their practices should be able to grow, change direction and generate things that neither the artist nor the organisation could have predicted in advance.

I’m thinking about how we secure PINK’s future without losing the qualities that have made it work. We’ve spent the last few years testing ideas and developing programme strands that now have clear purpose and audiences. The next stage is giving that work longer-term support.

Over the next five years, we want to secure a permanent home, ideally by buying a building, and expand the physical resources artists can access. That includes dedicated workshop and fabrication facilities with our long-term collaborator Johnny Billinge and SAWN.

We also want PINK to be open and usable more often. Our community values having somewhere to gather, work and talk, so I’m interested in a daytime café and workspace model.

Ultimately, I want PINK to become somewhere artists can rely on as part of their working lives, not somewhere they only encounter through a particular opportunity.

What I’m learning is that there isn’t a single model of artist development that works for everyone. Artists might need space, equipment, money, knowledge, critical dialogue, peers or simply a clearer understanding of how the sector works — often several at once. Those needs are also shaped by their background, circumstances and route into practice. So our starting point has to be listening rather than deciding in advance what development should look like.

That principle shapes how we build programmes. Before our two recent UK Government-funded artist-development programmes, representing £100,000 of investment across a year, we asked artists directly what they needed and used that to guide where resources went.

I think of PINK as a learning institution: each encounter should inform what we do next. This connects closely to my PhD, where I’m interested in knowledge being produced through practice and then allowed to alter the institution itself. Artists shouldn’t simply receive support from PINK; they should help teach the organisation what it needs to become.

Meaningful support has to be both material and relational. It’s difficult to ask an artist to take risks without time, money, space, access support or production resources underneath them. But artists also need trust, critical dialogue and relationships that extend beyond a single commission or exhibition.

I think the sector sometimes mistakes an opportunity for support. Visibility matters, but it doesn’t necessarily change the conditions in which someone is trying to sustain a practice. Too much responsibility can also be placed on artists to become resilient, entrepreneurial or professionally polished while those conditions remain precarious.

One positive shift I’m seeing is artist development becoming much more visible within the programmes and priorities of major institutions. But at the same time, many of the smaller independent spaces where that development already happens remain under-resourced and precarious.

Artists don’t suddenly begin developing when they enter a major institution. Much of that work happens over years in places like PINK and other grassroots spaces: through studios, peer relationships, experimentation, informal learning and opportunities to make and test work.

Yet those organisations are often making difficult decisions simply to keep that infrastructure alive. So I think the next shift needs to be recognising these spaces and the people building them as central to the UK’s arts ecology: investing in them properly, valuing the knowledge they produce, and recognising that they are developing not only artists, but future cultural leaders too.

I think artist-led spaces can build infrastructure by starting with practice rather than institutional form. Because they are close to artists’ day-to-day lives, they can see what is missing and build outward from that: space, equipment, peer networks, paid opportunities, fabrication, knowledge, international connections.

At PINK, a lot of what now looks like infrastructure began informally: a conversation, a shared need, an artist wanting to try something. The work is recognising when those recurring needs should become something more permanent and accessible to others.

That is where I think artist-led spaces are powerful. They can test new ways of working before they become fixed and keep reshaping them through use. The role isn’t simply to fill gaps in existing provision, but to turn practice-held knowledge into infrastructure that artists can actually use and shape.

I’m very influenced by European Kunsthalle models, places like Kunsthal Gent, Tensta konsthall and Kunstinstituut Melly, where exhibition-making sits alongside research, learning, publishing and public life. I’m also drawn to spaces like PRAKSIS in Oslo and PUBLICS in Helsinki, where learning and knowledge exchange are treated as part of cultural practice in their own right.

A major shift in my own practice came in 2018 through The Curatorial Thing at SixtyEight Art Institute in Copenhagen. It was a 2-week intensive learning programme that brought artists, curators and academics together through workshops, lectures and shared discussion. It expanded my understanding of curating beyond producing exhibitions and towards something collaborative, discursive and pedagogical: a way of creating the conditions for ideas, relationships and knowledge to develop.That experience has stayed with me and directly informs PINK’s international work now.

I wanted to join because New Contemporaries is engaging with questions central to PINK: longer-term artist development, relationships with artist-led spaces and how national organisations connect with local ecologies.

It also matters to me to bring my voice to a nationally recognised table. I’m working class, neurodivergent and female, and I’ve built my career outside conventional institutional routes. I know what it is to slip through gaps in established structures, and I want those experiences present when decisions are made.

With this I (and other artists) bring situatedknowledge that organisations cannot produce internally. We know where systems become barriers — if a fee is realistic, a timeline allows experimentation or an access policy actually works. That knowledge should have genuine influence over organisational decisions.

Build the conditions around your practice as seriously as you build the work. Find peers you trust and develop relationships with people who will have honest conversations with you.

Don’t mistake visibility for development or feel you must say yes to everything. A career in art rarely moves in a straight line, and having another job alongside your practice isn’t a failure.

Pay attention to what your practice actually needs, rather than what you think an artist should be doing.

And remember: you don’t need permission from a major institution to begin. If the conditions you need don’t exist, find other people and start creating them together.