#IWD2021: Creative Women Profile - Elena Jackson & Lauren Zawadzki
04 March 2021 by Michelle
To celebrate International Women's Day on 8th March 2021, we're featuring a series of pioneering and trailblazing women working in creative fields, who have a connection to Lancashire. Meet Elena Jackson and Lauren Zawadzki, the co-founders of Deco Publique and event creators extraordinaire!
International Women's Day on 8th March 2021 is an annual event that has been honouring women since 1911. This year's theme is #ChooseToChallenge. It's a global call to celebrate women's achievements, raise awareness against bias, and encourage us all to take action for equality, so that we can forge a gender-equal world.
You can find links to all our interviews for #IWD2021 here.
Elena Jackson & Lauren Zawadzki run an arts and culture company making original new work, based by the sea in Morecambe. Through the outcomes of their work, it's clear that they are firmly invested in, and committed to, supporting women, creatives, and Lancashire as a whole.
Tell us more about yourselves and what you do?
We are Elena & Lauren, co-founders of Deco Publique and respectively Artistic Director and Festival Director of the National Festival of Making.
Collectively with our team, we imagine, curate and produce unforgettable cultural festivals, original commissions and artistic projects that resonate with audiences and have tangible and lasting impacts on place - animating coastal spaces, rural landscapes and urban centres.
Our portfolio includes the National Festival of Making and Vintage by the Sea; the commissioning programme - Art in Manufacturing; co-design programme - The FOLD; the World Record Breaking Very Big Catwalk and the co-production of landscape artworks, Headlands to Headspace.
Lauren previously had a career in large-scale commercial construction, directing an organisation that worked on some of the UK’s largest construction projects. Lauren lives in Heysham Village, is married with three children, and is a trustee of music education charity, More Music based in Morecambe.
Elena is also a mum to three - a 23 year old daughter who lives away from home at university, and recently she became mum again to newborn twin boys. Elena lives in Morecambe and is also a board director of In-Situ, an embedded arts organisation based in Pendle, Lancashire.
What is your relationship to Lancashire?
LZ: Lancashire is everything to me. It’s my home; it's the place my Dad came to settle when he came here from Poland in the early 1970’s; it's the place I’ve had my children; the place I work and started our business and the place I went to school, which is where Elena and I first met in the mid 80’s around the age of 7. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else in the world. As much as I like to travel, Lancashire and Morecambe Bay is always somewhere I am overjoyed to come home to.
EJ: Our creative ideas and much of our work is rooted in Lancashire, often informed by the places we live and work. From the mesmerising beauty of Morecambe & Heysham, Sunderland Point and Silverdale in Morecambe Bay to the grand Victorian Parks in Preston, and the historic spaces in Blackburn like the Cotton Exchange - these locations have become part of our personal stories because of the work we’ve made here. My personal home life in Lancashire is entirely interweaved with our creative work, with so many of our family walks holding memories of festivals and projects and the people we made them with.
How long have you been doing this type of work, and how long has your company been running?
We first worked together at Preston Guild in 2012 and the experience of working at that festival shaped what we chose to do next, inspiring us to re-shape our careers and start Deco Publique.
Working at Preston Guild showed us how it feels to be part of a team delivering something of scale, and the impact a festival can have on people and place. We worked with women who became hugely influential to us - Stella Hall (Festival of Thrift) and Gerardine Hemingway (HemingwayDesign.)
We founded Deco Publique as a direct result of this, and are immensely proud that in eight years we have reached hundreds of thousands of people with work that we believe in.
What inspired you to do the work you do? Have you always done what you currently do?
Neither of us started our careers doing this, which says something about being bold enough to make significant changes and shifts to do things that make us feel happy, impassioned and fulfilled.
We believed that when we worked together we could make really great things happen, work that we believed in, and in places we loved.
Lauren gave up a career in construction where she’d progressed to Commercial Director to return to study for a degree in Music and Theatre Management at Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, and Elena left her role as a Senior Design Researcher at Lancaster University.
We went on to start Deco Publique like lots of creative businesses do - juggling full time jobs, study and childcare while building an art and festival business from our kitchen tables.
We believed that when we worked together we could make really great things happen, work that we believed in, and in places we loved.
We are lucky to have been supported by, mentored by, and to have worked with, some of the best female forces in the cultural sector, such as Kathryn MacDonald (More Music), Christine Cort (Manchester International Festival), Claire McColgan (Culture Liverpool), and Laurie Peake & Jenny Rutter (Super Slow Way).
We are inspired by dynamic female leadership and are committed to our own role to mentor and ensure the presence of women in this sector and are proud of the distinctiveness of our majority female teams.
We love this quote from Daisy who interned with us but is now a full time Project Manager:
“Producing the festival alongside like-minded women who have come together from a variety of backgrounds, whether interns, marketing freelancers or festival producers, makes for a social, laid-back and supportive team who always have each other’s backs. It’s a rarity that females dominate in the festival sector so to be part of an all-female team that put on incredible, nationally renowned events, is something I’m immensely proud of.” Daisy Williamson - Graduate Intern.
What do you love about being creative and working in creative industries?
LZ: No matter what the project, the absolute best outcome for me is the human-centred result - seeing people come together, take part, interact with one another - the sense of togetherness. When I look back, it's sometimes hard to believe what we’ve achieved in eight years; we are a micro organisation at heart, yet we’ve successfully delivered high impact experiences and results for the entire county, region, visitors and local communities.
EJ: Experiencing art and culture has an impact on how we feel - about ourselves, our surroundings, the world we live in, and our place in it. I can’t imagine working in any other sector that could bring me the same amount of joy that you can feel in making creative work, and sharing the outcomes with people.
In 8 years our independent and collaborative work has entertained over 500,000 people in the North over 250,000 of which were visitors from outside Lancashire and unique tourism visitors to the projects we created. We’ve had an economic impact for Lancashire of £12M and seen us work with approximately 450 businesses, artists and individuals, bringing over 350 national trading concessions to our weekend festivals.
How have the events of the last 12 months affected your way of working? (E.g. Black Lives Matter, Covid, Brexit, etc). How have you pivoted or adjusted the way that you work?
Obviously, it goes without saying that the last 12 months have been like nothing we could ever imagine; just like everyone else.
Throughout the last year, we’ve been supported by an incredible team, Daisy, Ellie, Becci, Jackie, Núria and Emma and they need a big shout out. They’ve been agile, responsive and have been prepared to try many new things.
While it's not all been bad (we’ve actually felt some great highs as a team), we’ve also had some incredible lows. In March 2020, our first planned mass gathering of the year, the National Festival of Making, which was then set to take place in June 2020, was cancelled. We had to make that decision early on in the pandemic and it really hit us hard.
This was followed by us cancelling what would have been our eighth Vintage by the Sea Festival, and having to completely rethink how a company that curates mass gatherings can operate effectively, during a pandemic that bans mass gatherings.
Amid the rapid changes, we established that under the circumstances we would work to uphold our aims and values as an organisation, would curate alternative programmes and would focus on providing relevant and meaningful guidance; be kind and generous with our time and mentor and support practitioners around us.
We felt really strongly about supporting work opportunities for the creatives that we knew would be most impacted by the loss of income, including emerging creatives who didn’t have finance records to claim government support, and young people graduating from universities who were facing a very different workplace and couldn’t count on creative industries to be their new employers.
Throughout the last year, we’ve been supported by an incredible team, Daisy, Ellie, Becci, Jackie, Núria and Emma and they need a big shout out. They’ve been agile, responsive and have been prepared to try many new things.
In some senses when we reflect on the last year, we have certain things to be grateful for. COVID has allowed us as a business to trial, test and explore multiple things that we would never have had the capacity, funding or time to try before. Some have worked and some less so, but we’ve accepted, and learnt from, the failures perhaps more than we would have allowed ourselves to before the beginning of 2020.
In other cases, we can wholeheartedly say that the new COVID version of projects such as Folded Zine, a project with young creatives in the South Lakes, is so much stronger, more creative, more embedded and better served to its participants than it was in its first iteration pre COVID, and that is something we are very proud of.
The theme for IWD2021 is #ChooseToChallenge. It's a global call to celebrate women's achievements, raise awareness against bias, and encourage us all to take action for equality. How are you helping to forge a gender equal world? What issues are you choosing to challenge in a creative way this year?
We both have personal and professional reasons for our individual commitment to support other women, both having experienced the overt and subtle differences in opportunity within the cultural industries that women face.
We do feel a sense of unease and inequality when we see majority male speakers on panel debates, almost all male guests when high-level organisations visit regional creative developments and the natural confidence of men versus women when speaking about their artistic work, us included.
Through Deco Publique, we actively challenge the balance wherever we can and at all levels, from opportunities for emerging female artists, to the executive and board level.
So, through Deco Publique, we actively challenge the balance wherever we can and at all levels, from opportunities for emerging female artists, to the executive and board level.
On International Women’s Day, we’re absolutely thrilled to be announcing that four female Board members are joining the Festival of Making CIC leadership team, each bringing an enormous amount of skill and expertise that will help shape the future of our organisation.
We ensure that our commissioning and programming has a strong gender balance. In 2019, NFM commissioned five original works to be shown at the festival weekend and four of the five commissioned artists were female. The wider festival programme presented a 50:50 gender equal ratio of activities, and in 2019, 90% of our freelance festival staff were females, in roles including Stage Management, Production Management, Artist Liaison and Crew.
Our ethos has always been about inspiring and nurturing new talent and since 2017, all five of the paid placements we’ve provided have gone to female graduates with close business links to Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts and Lancaster University.
For us, the IWD2021 #ChooseToChallenge theme very much resonates with our passion to make the choice to seek out and celebrate women's achievements.
Invite and allow yourself to be supported - look for mentorship from other women and offer it to others. And don’t wait to be given permission to start something. Just begin
Any advice for women launching a creative career / starting out in creative industries?
Working in a female partnership has given us a unique level of support that we each have a lot of gratitude for. We don’t often feel alone in an idea, and when we’ve been hesitant about taking a project to the next level, we can be there to support each other.
This has generated a sense in each of us that we want to support other female creative practitioners, and often we talk to women who feel alone in their individual pursuits and face, even in the liberal environment of the arts, sexism, elitism, discrimination. These elements are undeniably still present and experienced by almost every other woman we’ve spoken with about things that they feel hold them back.
We started Vintage by the Sea on the back of an idea for a single, one-off festival that we believed we could pull off, which went on to help us start Deco Publique, and continues to this day to reach hundreds of thousands of people with the work we want to create.
So, invite and allow yourself to be supported - look for mentorship from other women and offer it to others. And don’t wait to be given permission to start something. Just begin.
How has working or spending time in Lancashire or the North shaped or informed what you do today?
Since starting Vintage by the Sea in 2013, soon after Deco Publique, and in 2016 the National Festival of Making, we have felt a strong sense of being part of an artistic community.
The networks around us - made up of artists, performers, producers, photographers, the local authorities and so many more, give us a sense of being grounded here, and we’re very proud to have a highly skilled creative team based by the sea in Morecambe.
We think a lot about making work here in the North, what that means to us, the disparity of investment in culture between North and South, and between somewhere like Morecambe compared to per head investment in culture in somewhere like Manchester.
Whilst we don’t want to dwell on often temporary agendas like ‘Northern Powerhouse’ or ‘levelling up’, we recognise something in ourselves about a level of stoicism and commitment to making work right here, whatever the circumstances, the best it can possibly be.
The question for us isn’t why make work in places like Morecambe, it’s why not?
Invite and allow yourself to be supported - look for mentorship from other women and offer it to others. And don’t wait to be given permission to start something. Just begin
Follow the Deco Publique team on Twitter and Instagram
Photography by Robin Zahler, Lee Smillie, Derren Lee Poole and Danny Allison.
Look out for more profiles featuring creative women from or connected to the county in articles throughout this week on our news page.
About International Women's Day - March 8, 2021
International Women's Day is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating gender parity. Significant activity is witnessed worldwide as groups come together to celebrate women's achievements or rally for women's equality. internationalwomensday.com
