Making connections
ConnectCurateCreate is driven by a deep-rooted passion for empowering art and creativity, coupled with extensive expertise in learning innovations and community building.
Our founder, Dr. Tim Butcher, based in Tasmania, holds a unique distinction as one of the few individuals worldwide with an Engineering Doctorate (EngD), and perhaps the only one with an arts practice.
Tim’s 20-year academic career spanned leading universities in Australia and the UK, and visiting positions globally. He is internationally-recognised as an innovator in higher education, a sociologist of work, a visual ethnographer, and a leading theorist of collaborative learning practices. Tim’s research has delved into the intricacies of collective human experience and cultures of collaboration, to identify new directions in creative learning. Tim has led significant projects to improve student learning outcomes and successful research projects with a diversity of organisations and communities, from global manufacturers like Rolls Royce to remote Aboriginal communities, freelance creatives, socially-engaged artists, and arts organisations, including the Tate and Counterpoints Arts.
In his book, 'Creative Work Beyond Precarity: Learning to Work Together,' published by Routledge in 2023, Tim challenges conventional economic paradigms surrounding art and creativity, advocating for a fair go and showing how artists and creatives can lead the way in building better futures for ourselves, culture and society.
Founded on ideas from the book (details below), ConnectCurateCreate exists to enable you to unlock your creative potential together.
Tim writes a weekly newsletter, ruminating on his founder journey and how together we can reshape life and work in the arts and creative industries.
Testimonials
“Tim’s unique and important background in research surrounding creative labour truly empowers his latest endeavour, ConnectCurateCreate. This platform is built not only on deep knowledge, but also significant passion. Tim is a great listener, thinker and this next development will garner the ability to empower creatives of all kinds of backgrounds, and I look forward to seeing how it develops.”
Zara Sully, Director, Sawtooth ARI, Lutruwita
“In previous collaborations Tim could be trusted to centre artists and arts workers’ interests and arts practices. His curiosity about people, his creativity and passion for fairness match Tim’s knowledge of how complex systems work and concepts made accessible. Inventing ConnectCurateCreate looks to bring all of Tim’s experience into one platform that all kinds of creatives and organisations would find interesting and enabling.”
Dijana Rakovic, Senior Producer, Counterpoints Arts, UK
Founded on Tim’s academic research
Creative Work Beyond Precarity: Learning to Work Together
Tim’s book offers an original critical evaluation of how freelance arts and creative careers can be established and sustained in the increasingly uncertain global creative economy.
Endorsements of the book
"In this beautifully written and strongly engaged text, Tim Butcher shows how creative work might be liberated from precarious labour through a systematic focus on collaboration. Weaving skilfully between theories of affect, precarity and learning and stories of artistic practice, the outcome is an impassioned argument for realising new possibilities within creative economy"
Prof. Steven D. Brown, Nottingham Trent University, UK
"Tim Butcher raises a number of provocative questions: Can we work creatively and freely without experiencing precarity and complicity with labour market logics? Can the creative arts contribute to discussions of equality, marginalization, and social change? He addresses these questions through a blend of academic sources, artist reflections, and his own experience."
Prof. Ann L Cunliffe, FGV-EAESP, Brazil
Quotes from the book
Work is so much more than what is individually traded as labour — it should be a life affirming collective cultural encounter filled with possibility, and if it doesn’t feel that way, then we should do something about it. (P68)
Creative work is not found to nor benefits from precarity. So, from these fresh roots, new collaborative creative work practices might be learned to propagate an alternative discourse — one that is less economically driven and more culturally meaningful. (P69)