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Suzy Kerr Pertic

Suzy Kerr Pertic

00:00:03 I’m Suzy Kerr Pertic and I’m a Pro-Dean in the faculty of arts and human sciences at London South Bank University. I work with the Dean and another Pro-Dean on all aspects of university life, so my particular role is everything to do with developing new courses. And because my role is academic, I also teach. I teach on an arts management course and I do research. What I like most about the job is probably what most of my colleagues would say is it’s the students, and what I really like is being able to play a part in their lives, and that’s the part that’s really rewarding.

00:00:42 When I was sixteen I decided I wanted to be an artist. My family were shocked. They weren’t very enthusiastic but they were supportive once I’d made the decision, and I think they also figured out there was no changing my mind. I think they just thought I was mad, actually. I was mad. Why would I want to study something where I was never going to earn a living from it?

00:01:04 I went to quite an academic school, where most of the people in my class went to study subjects like economics, maths, chemistry, and so on. It was quite unusual at that time for someone to decide they wanted to be an artist, so I applied to go to art school, and it wasn’t so much about the art as wanting to do something that I thought would be very different, very exciting, and something that my school and my family didn’t want me to do.

00:01:35 I’d come across some artists that I’d read about in an art history book who were living and working in Poland, and I really fancied myself as a political revolutionary so I applied to the Polish government for a scholarship to go and study in Warsaw. During the time that I lived there, everything was managed by the military and I was afraid a lot of the time, personally afraid that I would do something that would get me into trouble with the military. It opened my eyes I think to what was really important in life, and it was certainly the basis for my future career, and actually, as it happened, I met my husband in Warsaw at that time.

00:02:17 Then through a series of coincidences really I was invited to include some work in an exhibition which was going to tour to America. So I continued to work as an artist for quite a long time, but I needed to have a job in order to get a work visa to stay in the States and ended up being offered a job to run a not for profit photography gallery. So that was really the beginning of my second career as a curator and arts manager. 

00:02:52 I stayed in Los Angeles for about, about six years, and one day I had a visit from an artist from Birmingham who was travelling the country and it reminded me of English humour, and on the spur of the moment I decided that I would move back to London, and was very, very lucky to get a job at the photographer’s gallery. And through that work I was invited to do some part-time teaching, and so I kind of found myself falling into my third career, and a couple of years after that came to South Bank when they introduced the first arts management course at this university.

00:03:31 This is a little disposable camera. I’m not sure they even make them anymore. And this was given to me as a gift when I left the photographer’s gallery. My friends and colleagues there knew that I was a really big fan of the musician Nick Cave, and Nick Cave used to come into the gallery quite often to look at the exhibitions, so they asked him if he would shoot a roll of film for me, and my husband suggested that I kept it and that I remained in suspense and never knew that was inside, and he was right. So I keep it on my desk because it reminds me of the suspense of not knowing, and I think this object is really very symbolic of  how I’ve liked to live my life. It’s the not knowing what’s going to come next that’s so interesting.