10 Rules for Ex-Students and Creatives
In this blog, Production Assistant Meg Bowyer reflects on her career pathway through the eyes of Sister Corita Kent’s ’10 Rules for Students and Teachers’, highlighting the key roles that Lancaster Arts played in this journey.
In 2016, I chose to join the BA Fine Arts course at Lancaster University, pivoting away from a STEM degree I’d spent two years of my A-Levels working up to. This wasn’t a decision to abandon biology, physics, ecology, but a realisation that I wanted to research on my own terms. To be making and investigating within a creative practice, which could be used to share these interests with all kinds of audiences. Over the last (almost) decade, I’ve had the privilege of working and studying with organisations which do just that—use the arts to connect with environmental issues, politics, and people in innovative and exciting ways.
I didn’t take a very straight career path, meandering between lots of different roles and industries to get to this point (something I’m sure will ring a bell for FHASS students and creatives everywhere). However, I’ve always approached my career and artistic practice with the same model; Sister Corita Kent’s “10 Rules of Students and Teachers”; a creative rubric developed by Corita Kent (1918-1986) in Immaculate Heart College, popularised by her close friend John Cage.
This model is something which speaks to Lancaster Arts’ approach too, focussing on artist development, care, and interdisciplinary thinking.
RULE 1: Find a place you trust, and then, try trusting it for a while.
RULE 2: (General Duties as a Student)
Pull everything out of your teacher.
Pull everything out of your fellow students.
RULE 3: (General Duties as a Teacher)
Pull everything out of your students.
Helpful Hints: Always go to classes.
Come or go to everything.
Rules 1-3 are easy to achieve on Lancaster University’s campus. Whilst working in the studio, writing, and taking part in the theatre and film society, I was attending exhibitions and events ran by Lancaster Arts—pulling everything out of my time here. Watching Mimbre’s ‘The Exploded Circus’ in 2018 stands out as something which solidified my desire to work in live arts and theatre.
As Production Assistant, I have been supporting and recruiting our volunteers and hope they get the same excitement from our programme that I did as an audience member. They have gained experience across a very wide variety of events, including gallery invigilation, front-of-house for theatre and concerts, and helping us manage festivals. Are You Lost? this summer was a highlight, where a group of volunteers (students, staff, and Lancashire locals) joined us in sunny Dunsop Bridge to support a very diverse range of activities. We have a small team of heritage volunteers too, helping us pull everything out ofthe archival collection, as it is digitised and uploaded to the Museum Data Service.
Corita Kent’s advice? Come or go to everything. Better yet, volunteer and see it for free!
RULE 4: Consider everything an experiment.
RULE 5: Be Self Disciplined. This means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
RULE 6: Follow the leader. Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make.
Helpful Hints: Always Be Around.
I graduated, stayed in Lancaster, and started to work in hospitality. I knew the skills I had developed over my undergraduate degree: creative problem-solving, design, time management, arts writing, but didn’t know where to direct them. So, time to experiment! I continued with theatre, stage managing and designing costumes. I got back in touch with old friends and started working behind the scenes for Cumbria Opera Group. I worked as a steward for LICA, as an artwork handler for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize, as a baker, a barista, everything, and anything. I was self-disciplined, keeping up with my personal practice, and applying for post-graduate courses. Finally, I was accepted onto a master's degree in drawing, at Paris College of Art.
Then lockdown. COVID-19 made travel to France impossible. I postponed my MFA plans by a year. But nothing is a mistake. In 2021 Lancaster Arts’ new BRIDGES Curator bursary opened, and I got the opportunity to work with their team of curators, producers, and technicians. I joined during the season theme of Water and was tasked with selecting archival artworks for the exhibitionShifting Currents. This exhibit accompanied a performance If you light a candle, you also cast a shadow, a hybrid dance theatre work by Company Carpi, in the Peter Scott Gallery.
Despite only being a two-month placement, BRIDGES sent me along so many influential paths. Experience writing exhibition interpretation bolstered my curatorial practice, and I went on to undertake freelance curation gigs in France. My relationship with artists Gary Lloyd and Bettina Carpi from Company Carpi lasted well beyond the bursary, and as If you light a candle, you also cast a shadow toured around venues in the Northwest, I followed with them as the show’s installation artist. Andy Goldsworthy’s Morecambe Ice Flow - Morecambe Bay Stone - Scaur Glen Snowball, on display in Shifting Currents, inspired a writing and presentation placement I undertook with Terra Foundation for American Art in Paris, talking to French students about Land Art.
BRIDGES also gave me my first taste of archival and collections work—something I had never considered before. I wrote a blog from my time working with the storerooms, which you can find here.
RULE 7: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It is the people who do all the work all the time who eventually catch onto things. You can fool the fans—but not the players.
Helpful Hints: Read everything you can get your hands on.
Helpful Hints: Look at movies carefully and often.
Even whilst living in France, my mind was on arts in the Northwest of England. My master's dissertation focused on the overlap of geology, drawing, and nuclear fallout in Cumbria. Inspired by newfound interests in archives, I worked with Tullie House in Carlisle to create an exhibition and writing from their storeroom. I returned to the UK permanently in 2023, working hard to catch onto things. Back to barista-ing, managing theatre and live music events in Kendal, and running a weekly movie club. With my experience in the archive, learning database software MODES, I eventually began working as a Collections Assistant with the Armitt Museum. I came back to Lancaster Arts, joining the Ideas&Connectors Group to support exhibitions like Chambers of Wonder, which is still on display in the gallery.
The initial excitement in theatre and performance which Lancaster Arts instilled in me persisted, and I continued to stage manage for Opera, as well as for companies like Fevered Sleep, as they performed Men & Girls Dancein Barrow-in-Furness.
RULE 8: Do not try to create and analyse at the same time. They are different processes
RULE 9: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It is lighter than you think.
All these pathways that BRIDGES opened for me circled back round to my current position with Lancaster Arts. My multidisciplinary background is the advantage here, working with a combined arts programme that requires knowledge across many art forms. The only rule is work. If you work, it will lead to something. Come or go to everything.
I rejoined Lancaster Arts in their season of Land, a lovely echo back to my first season with them, Water. It is a season which has come with lots of joy. Dance parties in Poulton with HereNowThis, folk music with If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution…, days out in the Bowland fells.
If there is any advice in this blog, it is to follow any, and all, opportunities which excite you—wherever you might find them. Take risks, try things you have never done before, always be around.
RULE 10: We are breaking all the rules, even our own rules, and how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for “x” qualities.
Helpful Hints: SAVE EVERYTHING. It may come in handy later.
Meg will be starting a new job in January 2026, but she won’t be going far! She is taking up the post of Programme Associate with Art Gene in Barrow-in-Furness and will continue to work with Lancaster Arts on their upcoming collaboration with Art Gene: Do It Together!
