Our RUPT Associates share their practice and lived experience with CADA to help us to scope a long-term plan to increase voice, visibility and positive action. They are four older diverse creatives, recruited to disRUPT the status quo and explore the ‘art of the possible’ when it comes to creativity, diversity and ageing.
Note: Bunmi Ogunsiji has left the RUPT programme.
Poem: The Advent of Ageing. By The RUPT Associates.
To mark Age Without Limits Day, CADA’s RUPT Associates – Maya Chowdhry, Amanda Holiday, and Sama Hunt (three underrepresented, underserved artists) – are proud to launch a bold new poem that reimagines what it means to grow older. Find out more here>
Listen to the poem on YouTube or Spotify.
The RUPT Associates
Amanda Holiday. I was active in the British Black Art movement in the 1980s and exhibited my artwork in key shows of the time before moving into film making. After scripting various feature length dramas, I moved to South Africa for 10 years where I worked in educational television.
My writing has been published in various journals and in 2020, I founded Black Sunflowers Poetry Press. I am currently completing a PhD in Poetry, Race and Art and freelance for various organisations including the National Portrait Gallery and ORNC.
My 1987 artwork Red Riding Hood was included in Women in Revolt! Tate Britain and my work is due to be shown in 2 forthcoming exhibitions with Vivienne Roberts Projects.
‘Creative ageing’ encompasses a large part of who and what I am. For me, being a RUPT Associate is about taking stock of a creative career and collaborating with others to bring an absolute melange of creative experience together to activate change: whether that is attitudinal, systemic, political or social change.
Embracing creativity and maintaining an inventive and resilient mindset as we age is valuable to everyone. Artists, (the ones who are lucky enough get that far) seem surprisingly good at aging creatively. We RUPT Associates can lead the way!
Maya Chowdhry. I’m an interdisciplinary artist using sound art, installation and live art to interrogate themes such as food sovereignty and climate justice; often through playful and provocative interventions. I began my career with Sheffield Women’s Film Co-op in the ’80s and wrote for radio and theatre in the ’90s. In 2020 I was selected for bOlder, a talent development programme with Castlefield Gallery, for Greater-Manchester based contemporary visual artists aged 50+, which aimed to counter ageist practice in the arts. Through this I have presented my work at events such as Manchester’s Creative Ageing Forum. I am currently a Factory International Fellow using sound design to explore personalisation in large immersive works.
Intersectionality is important to me – the RUPT associates programme embraces this by working with the lived experience of older diverse artists. Using a creative methodology RUPT aims to challenge ideas around creativity/\ageing/\representation/\inclusion.
As a QTIPOC older artist I work to foster an understanding that many voices need to be visible – the arts is a place that allows audiences and participants to experience and digest the many layers of these complexities.
Sama Hunt. My practice as a multidisciplinary artist/art psychotherapist has always been about enabling creative process and practice whether on an adult psychiatric ward or within a community setting with young people who are exploring grief.
My current art practice is situated at the juncture between midwifering through movement, both real and imagined praxis in reenactment. My source material is often from stories that are often un- or under-told. I work through the mediums of film, movement and prose.
I’d like to honour our natural human proclivity to dance, sing and make art. Not as a skill, although we do become skilled, but as an expression in acknowledgement of our innate human impulse to create and propagate.
This is the thing that humans do, as we grow and transform we create art to understand ourselves and each other, to sense make and because it affirms us. Art assuages the capitalist oppression we all endure.
Being a RUPT associate gives me an opportunity to trouble current long held narratives about who gets to make and participate in art.
To work with the RUPT Associates email us
Radical Creative Ageing: Passion & Practice – An Immersive Gathering
In July 2024, we collaborated with The Whitworth Gallery and the Artivists Group to host a partnership event, co-created alongside our RUPT Associates.
The afternoon focussed on ‘thinking, by doing, creatively, together’ and the evening presented an opportunity to develop a new Radical Creative Ageing Plan for the future.
One delegate reviewed the event stating “In summary, CADA’s Radical Creative Ageing event was a provocative and eye-opening experience I would encourage anyone working creatively with older people to check out their work and also consider what being an older artist or arts practitioner, whether now or in the future, might mean for one’s practice and broader sense of self.” See the full article here.
To get a sense of what happened on the day, visit the event’s Fanzine page where you can link to the video, podcast and Fanzine.
Creative Ageing: Development & Agency 