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Written by smh.com.au
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Wednesday, 19 November |
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Rebecca Matthews has just swapped her Sydney Opera House office with its sparkling waterfront view for the brutalist architecture of the Edgecliff Centre.
REBECCA MATTHEWS has just swapped her Sydney Opera House office with its sparkling waterfront view for the brutalist architecture of the Edgecliff Centre.
But the new director of the British Council is not complaining. She has made sacrifices before. Indeed, her introduction to arts organisations as a bright-eyed, if impoverished, assistant at the London International Theatre Festival in 1991 meant a diet rich in cultural engagement but short on protein.
"I lived on baked potatoes. That's all I could afford, five days a week," Matthews says. "But I loved it … I learned so much about how to ground cultural work in the community."
They are lessons she continues to draw on as she assumes her new role as the council's first female director and the first appointed from within Australia.
Matthews, the Opera House's former head of government relations, is one of the best-connected arts strategists in the business. She has worked for a number of cultural organisations in Sydney, including the Powerhouse Museum and the Australia Council.
In a sense she has come full circle. She was the British Council's manager of arts and cultural relations when she arrived in Australia in 1998 after graduating from Cambridge and completing a masters at the Courtauld Institute of Art.
Although the council, which turns 75 next year, has long been associated with arts, education and sport, Matthews points to new priorities, including climate change.
"I love its ability to adapt," she says. "It's not this old crusty model of an organisation that doesn't know how to move."
The council has assisted British artists to work here with Australian artists, and is assisting the Sydney tour by the London theatre company Complicite, which opens its acclaimed production A Disappearing Number at the Sydney Theatre tonight.
But the trade is not one way. The council will next year help the playwright Tommy Murphy to work with Britain's Royal Court, and recently helped the designer Emma Scott-Child work with Damien Hirst on his recent exhibition publication under the Realise Your Dream Program. It is a tailored program in which Australian artists work in Britain with leading practitioners in their field.
Also in the pipeline is Cityscapers, in which 15 students from the College of Fine Arts will work with students from Asia and Scotland on a project looking at how to make city environments more creative places in which to live. Read Full Article |
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