Justine is a poet, drawer and performance artist. She is a founding member of tbC and has been instrumental in developing the group’s multi-artist-led and peer mentoring model of practice.
Engaging with tbC is like finding a community of interesting, curious humans that have no agenda other than to make art. It is a wholesome yet challenging and edgy space. It supports both my collaborative and solo practice, allowing communal and individual authorship to exist simultaneously. Engaging young people is often a very exhausting exercise and it seems like adults don’t usually understand or remember what it was like to be young - so they try all sorts of strange and alien ways to ‘get the kids into it’. tbC doesn’t even try to do any of this. It succeeds just by being a genuinely interesting, inclusive and open space. The studio environment at tbC is an easy-going but highly charged one. Young people engage in group and solo artistic practices enthusiastically and intuitively. This is one of the strengths of tbC as a collective. So too is its mature and professional environment, something that offers young artists opportunities seldom found in classrooms or when working alone.