Creative conversations is a series of conversations with artist practitioners, arts officers, and commentators about the arts sector, funding, 2012 and the Cultural Olympiad.

This week Sarah Gilpin, a sculptor based on The Isle of Portland, joins me, at her Sculpture Hut - a beach hut studio at Portland Bill. We start off by hearing Sarah’s route to being an artist and moving to Portland.

We talk about the richness of taking people out into the landscape to work. That rather then taking photographs of the landscape, of the place, into a classroom and talking about these places. If you can take people into this landscape then their experiences are a million times richer.

We then move onto what advice we could give young artists setting out now. We then hear about her involvement with ArtWey and the benefits to her practice of working within a collective of artists.

Talking about ways local artists can “up their game”, Sarah has a good idea in that there should be more mentoring opportunities for local artists to tag along with the commissioned artists.