‘We’re not vanilla’: Starting a new creative life after 50
The exhibition aiming to smash perceptions about age and artistry
Swati Best expected to continue her opticians business until she retired; but when an attractive offer to sell up appeared out of the blue, she found herself with an itch to do something else. “I effectively retired at 63, but still with the mental capacity to explore something new,” she says.
Best also had a decades-long desire to learn photo editing. Having organised her wedding on a shoe-string budget of £300, her wedding photos had been taken by a well-meaning but underqualified friend, and she had always wanted to gain the skills to improve them.
As an optometrist, with an encyclopedic knowledge of lenses, photography was an obvious new venture for Best, however it turned out to be much more of a learning curve than she had anticipated. “I can waffle on about the theory of it but actually how you hold the camera [is totally different]. What the eye sees isn’t necessarily what one captures with a camera,” she explains.
After years of committing herself to learning the art of photography, Best’s photos will be exhibited at White Space Gallery alongside six other artists from 21-26 November.
Jo Birch, fellow exhibitor at White Space, is also late to the photography world. Her journey from a career in psychotherapy and personal coaching began in the most mundane of moments; while stacking chairs. After an event that Birch herself had organised, when attendees were happily mingling; a coworker asked Birch why she was tidying chairs away rather than chatting with the others. “I said I’m not very good at the mingling bit” explains Birch, “and she said go out there and be a queen, this is your gig.”
This planted a seed in Birch’s mind. What could she do to feel comfortable being that “queen”- what makes people good at speaking? She started seeing a voice coach, and then signed up to the Flames drama group based in the Festival Theatre.
Amid this growing confidence and learning about performance, Birch stumbled into a photography retreat in Spain, because it promised hill walks rather than the more common, sedate, still, retreat activities of yoga, pilates and writing. “The funny thing is photography has brought me stillness that I didn’t think I wanted,” she says.
Birch, as a psychotherapist, was well aware of the mental health benefits of her new creative outlet; but she felt like she was learning fast and producing good work, too. External affirmation of this came when her photos started being accepted by galleries like the Glasgow Gallery of Photography.
The Zero to 50 Collective:
Birch and Best started meeting other creatives who all began their creative journey after the age of 50. From collage artists and painters to performance artists, photographers and filmmakers; each had their own story of getting into art later in life. An actress who stopped being offered jobs when she turned fifty and moved behind the camera as a filmmaker; a doctoral researcher who stumbled into writing poetry on the side of their papers; a fifty-year-old finally getting into theatre after their dad forbade them from studying drama at school.
Birch saw the richness in what all of these artists were producing, and decided that the group might as well put on an exhibition; “worst case scenario nobody comes and we all get together and chat for a week, that’d be nice,” she said. The Navigating Life Exhibition is far from inward-looking, however; addressing themes such as death, racism, climate change, human impact and human struggle, Birch insists that this group of older artists are “certainly not vanilla.” Workshops in photography, poetry and collage art offer teaching in the skills that the Zero to 50 artists have learned too.
Far from seeing art as something they wished they had done earlier, the Zero to 50 artists say that their art is better than it would have been if they were doing it in their 20s. For Birch, her confidence in her fifties is a huge benefit to her work; she has more confidence to approach people and ask to take photos, and to display her work and accept that some people will love it, but others won’t. Best believes that her age makes her more approachable as a street photographer, and helps her to gain trust from strangers who she might like to photograph. “When I go out with my camera on my own, I think because I’m a visibly old Asian woman… people talk to me,” she says.
Tackling misperceptions of ageing:
Birch and Best both attest to the positive impact that their artistic practice has on their wellbeing. For Best, who saw people from 18 months to 102 years as an optometrist, photography allows her to keep meeting a variety of different people in her retirement. Working in the collective in particular helps the artists to feel like they are working with peers and colleagues, in what can be a very isolating industry, and at an isolating age.
But the group are keen to show that their art is not just therapeutic for themselves; it is contributing to the cultural landscape in its own right.
Birch’s first work was titled We’re not dead yet. “Because someone’s retired we might think they don’t want to learn. They just want to sit and watch and telly; but we’re still there. We can also be learning and successful,” she says. The Zero to 50 collective wants to challenge the perceptions of older people as not contributing to society, as pitiable or as static.
Research by The Centre for Better Ageing has confirmed that older people are seen as more pitiable and incapable than younger demographics. In the professional space, this can mean that older people are assumed to be less trainable and lower performing than their younger colleagues. According to Stop Hate UK, older people “can miss out on job opportunities because of the assumption that they can’t perform in today’s tech-driven world.”
By learning completely new skills, the Zero to 50 collective are proving that older minds can be malleable, and that older artists can contribute to the modern age. The name of the collective was chosen to suggest 50 is the jumping off point, the start of something new; not the beginning of the end. The group are keen, through their exhibition and through future events, to inspire other people to pursue new skills in their later years.
Most of all, Birch and Best want visitors to their exhibition to go away with a positive view of ageing. “We are embracing getting older, we’re seeing it as a positive. The ticking clock is not a disaster, the ticking clock for us has actually been empowering,” says Best.