Developing Your Creative Practice: A Year of Discovery

I am coming to the end of my Arts Council England Funded, Developing Your Creative Practice Project with just over 1 month to go.

When I first applied for this funding last year, I had no idea the impact that this was going to have on me both personally and professionally.

I am currently in the phase where I am reflecting and evaluating the work I have done and as part of this process, I wanted to share some of my reflections in this blog.

I will cover:

• Why did I want to apply for Developing Your Creative Practice?

• What have I achieved over the last year?

• Reflections and Impact on my Practice,

• What is next for me?

  
  

Why did I want to apply for Developing Your Creative Practice?

By the summer last year, I had been working as a freelancer for 3.5 years delivering training around autism and accessibility to a wide range of sectors.

I was realising that I wanted to focus my work specifically within the museum and heritage sector as well as make my work more sustainable for me.

I was beginning to realise how fatigued purely offering training was making me, questioning the impact that training was having and had been wanting to make the move into more consultancy based work for a while.

By applying for Developing Your Creative Practice, it has allowed me the opportunity to take risks and try something new.

What have I achieved over the last year?

Since I started my Developing Your Creative Practice project in December 2024, I have:

• Researched the current situation with accessibility in museums and the support that is already available,

  
  

• Met with people working in and supporting the sector to gain their perspective,

  
  

• Taken part in 25 professional development and networking opportunities (with more still to come!),

  
  

• Trialled new ways of working with three fabulous and very different sites with the case studies of these to be shared in full soon,

  
  

• Launched this newsletter,

  
  

• Begun to form my new offering for the sector (training will still be available!),

  
  

• Shared about my work so far at the GEM Conference.

Emily, speaking at GEM Conference 2025.

Reflections and Impact on my Practice

As I approach the end of this project, there have been so many reflections about the work and research that I have done.

Common barriers around accessibility were found to be:

• Time constraints,

• Funding,

• Information sharing across teams,

• Lack of confidence.

  
  

Whilst there are some barriers that I knew I wouldn’t be able to address, as much as I would love to fix the funding situation, I wanted to see how I could tackle the other barriers.

I knew from my own experience how hard it is after you have attended a training session to actually implement what you have learnt or how to make sure everyone is trained without needing to close your site for an entire day.

The approach I took was a mix between consultancy and mentoring. By freeing up time by supporting staff with resource creation such as visual stories, by having collaborative conversations across teams to ensure a more consistent approach and by being realistic about what could be achieved for each site.

Whilst taking this approach there were several key reflections from myself that impacted me professionally and personally.

Firstly, that I had often been working in a way that wasn’t working for my own neurodivergent brain. I thrived on working on site and having conversations with staff. It has made me realise just how much I struggle with working from home due to lack of boundaries and the many distractions.

During this work, I have now started working from home a lot less, only when needing to for health reasons, and instead use co-working spaces or museum cafes for admin related work. Making this small change has had a positive impact on my approach to work as well as my mental health.

Secondly, the research I did at the start of the project highlighted that a lot of the work being done to support museums with accessibility is being delivered by people with lived experience. I am also one of those people.

However, not everyone understands what working with someone with lived experience means. In the case of autism, wider neurodivergence and disability it means we come with our own access needs which need to be met in order to have a positive working relationship, much like an autistic employee working in an organisation.

As a result of this finding, I have now created an ‘Access Rider’ which I now send out to everyone I am about to work with. This sets out the ways that I work best and any specific needs that I have. This helps to set clear expectations of working together from the very beginning.

I do also wonder if there is more work to be done to support museums working with freelancers with lived experience.

A final reflection from me that I also posed to attendees of the GEM Conference in September was, ‘Are we looking at access through an inaccessible lens?’.

The reality is a lot of the approaches taken around access such as training and report writing is because that seems to be the way that access has always been looked at. But how accessible is that?

For me personally, getting started with report writing and formulating my thoughts into a written format can sometimes be a real challenge but if asked to verbally do the same task this would be much easier!

There is also the reality that training sessions are not accessible for everyone, whether that is financially or due to training not always matching different learning styles. I found that having those conversations with a short summary email during the trial period really had an impact and that more people got involved with the conversation around access.

I am still working on the report writing element around access, I did trial a few ways as part of this project but am yet to find anything that works for both me and the museums I work with! This is something I will continue to work on in the future.

Initial reflections being gathered by writing ideas on post-it notes.

What is next for me?

I have been thinking a lot about what will come next once this project has ended.

Currently I have been working on redefining what it is that I offer which has also been updated on my website.

My new offer will include:

• Access Audits (neurodivergent focus only),

• Consultancy (including tailored mentoring and resource creation),

• Talks,

• Training.

  
  

I also hope to be talking and sharing more about this work at future conferences and events as well as continuing to develop my practice even further.

If you would like to find out more about how I can support your museum or about the work that I have been doing then please get in touch!