Imagine setting fire to half your art budget before lunchtime. Seven hot air balloons grounded in a field. Fourteen speakers. The Birmingham Symphony Orchestra waiting to be paid. And a city council expecting you to reach a hundred thousand people by the end of the week.
That is the kind of corner Luke Jerram has found himself in. And it is also the corner that produced Play Me, I’m Yours – pianos in the street for anyone to play. Two thousand of them. Seventy cities.
Welcome to Extraordinary Creatives. I’m Ceri Hand. Follow the show so episodes like this land in your feed every week.
Luke Jerram is the artist behind Museum of the Moon, Gaia, Helios, Park and Slide, Sky Orchestra, and Glass Microbiology. His work has been seen by tens of millions of people. Close to a thousand exhibitions across forty countries. Pieces held in over eighty permanent collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and the Wellcome Collection in London. And he has built all of this from a studio in Bristol, with a team around him, without gallery representation.
In this conversation you will hear how he funds projects nobody has made before, why he turned down Red Bull and Coca-Cola, and what he calls stamina of dissatisfaction – the last five percent that lifts a piece from good enough to worthy of people’s attention.
I hope you find this as inspiring as I did.
