#WomenToTheFore

We talk to curator and producer Martel Ollerenshaw, director of Arts & Parts

You've built an international career spanning Australia, the UK, and Europe. How did your journey in music begin, and what led you to creative music and the work you do today? 
I grew up in the northwest of Sydney at the foot of the Blue Mountains. I was always interested in the arts, and as a kid, I played the clarinet and the accordion. I was drawn to theatre and literature, but really I wanted to be an archaeologist. So I did an arts degree, with a major in archaeology alongside Art History and English Literature. 

I worked the entire time I was a student in arts-related roles — front of house, box office, and as a stage manager. That’s when I became aware of arts administration as a career path, and recognised it was a job about facilitating the work of others. This really appealed to me.

My first real job was at the Opera House in Sydney, in the Bennelong programme. It was called audience development then, but now I suppose it would also cover social inclusion. We worked with all sorts of people doing all sorts of things and none of it was mainstream.

I wanted experience in smaller organisations too, so I started volunteering for an organisation called The Song Company, a vocal ensemble that commissioned contemporary composers and also specialised in early music. It was a small team so I got a good grounding in arts administration and took notes at the board meetings.  It was here that I made connections which led to various jobs in the future. 

I moved around a bit and ended up in Melbourne, which had a great community of artists and arts workers and this is where I started specialising in working in music, sometimes improvised music, but mostly contemporary classical and early music. I got a job at the City of Melbourne in the culture department. The city was refurbishing the pipe organ in the Town Hall and commissioned Philip Glass to create a new work for it, which I produced. The work was for organ and didgeridoo, and after it premiered in Melbourne, we took it to the Lincoln Center in New York. 

That led me to meet Serious, a UK-based music organisation. During this time I raised some funds for a professional development trip, and Serious offered to host me and that led to a job with them. This is when I became really immersed in jazz — I worked there for 15 years. It was dynamic, ambitious and entrepreneurial — a very exciting place to be.

Initially, I worked on one-off events, took on the management of several clients including John Surman and Andy Sheppard (later Jules Buckley and Ayanna Witter Johnson) and established a publishing arm. In 2004 we started Take Five, the talent development programme for UK-based artists working in jazz and improvised music. I produced the pilot and because there was an appetite in the sector for those kinds of programmes, it became a large part of my working life. 

Once it was established, we created several different versions for musicians working in different genres or different locations and started collaborating with various EJN partners for some European editions. It was a very successful idea and eventually, it became a suite of programmes under the name of Seriously Talented. 

I learned a lot at Serious and when I left, I started my own company Arts & Parts.

As an Australian who has built a career between the UK, Europe, and Australia, how has this international perspective shaped your approach to producing and curating work?
I'm curious about other cultures, other people, other countries, and other languages, and I like to travel. Although I spend a lot of time in Australia I’ve not lived there full time since 2002, so I think it's quite natural for me to work internationally because a lot of the work that I do is either with artists who do not live in the territory where the work is taking place, or I am working somewhere away from where I grew up and where I live.  

I have built up a wonderful international network, and music and sound are perfect because they allow you to collaborate easily. That’s one of the reasons I like working in music — it is so mobile and therefore ideal when it comes to curating and producing international programmes and the work of international artists.

You're known for producing interdisciplinary work. What excites you about working at these intersections between different art forms and genres?
I’ve always followed my nose — seeking out collaborators and opportunities wherever I go. I've worked in music, dance, theatre, media art and more recently in the visual arts. Even though working in music has become my specialism, I’m really attracted to working with artists in any artform who like to experiment and to collaborate with other artforms. 

I work very closely with Genevieve Lacey, an Australian musician who plays the recorder and also works as a curator and makes interdisciplinary artworks with a basis in sound. I produce her interdisciplinary projects which often take several years to be realised. Together we've collaborated with visual artists, filmmakers, dancers, writers…There's always an amazing team of people on these projects —- technicians, lighting designers, sound designers. 

It's inspiring to be able to work with people with different skills, experience and vision. So interdisciplinary projects are a natural thing for me, right from my first job on the Bennelong programme. It keeps you on your toes and stops you from getting bored.

And what do you take from these cross-genre projects and bring back to your work in the music space?
I'm often disappointed with concerts. Even if the music is amazing, generally it’s not enough of an artistic experience for me. 

Artists who think deeply about how their work is going to be received by an audience are often more curious about collaboration and working with other artforms. It adds another dimension to the music and performance and makes for a richer audience experience, and hopefully a richer experience for the artists too. 

One of the things I try to instil in the artists participating in talent development programmes is the need to communicate with audiences in both musical and non-musical ways.  Sometimes I bring in artists from other artforms to help with this. It’s not always everyone’s cup of tea, but at least it makes the artists think and act outside of their comfort zone for a while, and sometimes there is a shift in their practice that reflects this experience. 


Have you faced any specific challenges as a woman in the creative music sector? 
It was hard for a young woman to get a toe-in when I was first working in Sydney. And since then I’ve experienced a range of challenges but they are not all necessarily, or maybe it’s more correct to say, overtly, related to gender.  Working in the arts is a challenging profession — rewarding but challenging.

The jazz scene has been heavily male and there is a lot of conscious and unconscious bias, but I've also seen it change and I've been part of the next generation of women coming through, facilitating that change. 

Can you say more about the aims of Women to the Fore, and the discussions the EJN board were having around gender at the time the initiative was formed?
When I was on the board of the Europe Jazz Network board, we, like previous boards, were grappling with what to do next around gender. A lot of work had already been done — we had the Gender Manifesto in place, and we were the first board with more female members than male members. 

I was interested in moving the work along, to make it meaningful and positive for our community — to look forward to what we could do rather than looking back and discussing the ways that women and other minorities have been overlooked, harassed, and discriminated against.  

I wanted us to be on the front foot, changing the narrative, and to be actively working with women who were part of the adventurous music community. 

I was also conscious that various opportunities were going to men by default and I wanted the EJN and others to be more imaginative and expansive when thinking about how to share resources. I strongly felt that we should focus on contemporary women, rather than historical figures — these are the women who need their profiles raised, the ones working now and giving us the benefit of their knowledge and expertise.  

I coined the title Women to the Fore — it was about creating different pathways to develop awareness, relationships and networks of women in the sector. I wanted it to highlight the diverse and exemplary work of women in the sector, and to provide more opportunities for them.  

There’s much better representation at the EJN now and this includes a younger generation of women too. When I first started going to EJN conferences in 2008 it was mostly older men in their fifties and sixties.  The last couple of EJN conferences have been unrecognisable — in gender terms — from what they were before.

But as someone who operates in a postcolonial world, I found it interesting that these discussions were very much focused on gender. That's important, but we need to think more broadly about inclusion — but I think that the EJN is making progress in that direction now.

Did you have any role models or mentors who inspired and influenced you?
I've been really fortunate to have a lot of different jobs in different places, and along the way there have been some pretty inspiring people. Highlighting just a few: Anna Grega, who ran the Bennelong programme at the Sydney Opera House, was amazing — she had a strong philosophical and ethical framework. It was a very formative time for me and taught me to look beyond the mainstream.

In Melbourne, I was fortunate to work alongside Steven Richardson, who ducks and dives through things and is artistic and entrepreneurial, with lots of fingers in all sorts of pies. There seemed to be no barriers to what he thought he could do, and what he did do. His practice was inspiring when I was thinking about setting up Arts & Parts.

When I went to Serious, John Cumming was truly extraordinary to work alongside — imaginative, hardworking, well networked and the master of the ‘art of the hang’.  And of course, the company did some pretty exceptional work.

Overall, I’ve been very fortunate that so many colleagues, both artists and art workers have been generous, supportive, inspirational and fun.

Having worked on talent development and mentoring programmes like Sound Out and Take Five, what do you think are the most crucial forms of support that emerging artists and music professionals need today?
Access to funding without too many non-artistic obligations is crucial. When you work in experimental, not-for-profit artforms, the need for funding never goes away. It needs to be balanced better to support people at all stages of their career, so they can continue to create and share new work throughout their careers.

An effective export office is also essential. Many countries in Europe, particularly the Nordics, have really effective export strategies and proactive offices. Without that, artists have fewer opportunities beyond their own territory. 

Then there’s opportunity — all artists need somewhere to play, invitations to collaborate, and champions of their work, like a festival director or venue programmer. There was talk in the pandemic about doing things differently — offering more commissions, longer stays in fewer places and joined-up tours so that the artists can have a more sustainable working life.

I’d love to see more of that. It would help conserve artists’ creative energy, be better for the environment, and help build deeper relationships with audiences. 

Talent development programmes, and to an extent mentoring programmes, are very important too. They help demystify the sector and give artists the opportunities and networks they need to build a sustainable career. It’s a long-term investment in artists and their creative practice and involves lots of talking, sharing information and building relationships.  It’s a lot of work behind the scenes and the benefits are not always immediate, but you see an artist grow in confidence and start to understand the sector better. 

These schemes are also a great way to spot artists with international potential, and to really understand what that artist wants and needs to build their career. And hopefully, you and the people you bring into the process can help artists to identify the right opportunities in these crucial early career years.  

What advice would you give to young people looking to work in artist management or producing roles?
Well, it's not a job for everyone. There are no regular hours and it's pretty exhausting. If you want a regular life in one place and a guaranteed income, then the way that I work is not for you.

But if you're curious and, I suppose, a bit of a gambler, and you’re passionate about the arts and like the idea of keeping lots of working relationships active across many territories and time zones, then it could be for you. I'm constantly carrying my past, my present, my future, it's all there and I've got to work out when to activate what.

I like the variety of working as a producer, and I do a mixture of paid and volunteer work. You need to be wary about taking on too much - that’s often a problem for me - that, and knowing where your boundaries and limits are. 

Your work often has an environmental focus, particularly with Raise the Alarm. How do you see environmental issues and consciousness intersecting with creative music programming?
There's a whole stream of my work focused on advocacy and consciousness-raising, and I just completed a Masters in Curatorial Practice at the Glasgow School of Art, where I developed a platform called Raise the Alarm. It presented the work of interdisciplinary artists who make work in response to nature, the environment, and the climate emergency.

That was the culmination of lots of thinking and of many projects that I've worked on with an environmental focus, and brought it all together in a festival format. I am working to expand this into a regular platform.

Insisting on no single-use plastic, taking the train and thinking through more sustainable ways to tour and perform are important, and I observe these whenever I can. But what I’m most interested in is the artists who are making work that responds to the environment — the place where art and activism meet can be very powerful. 

You’re a member of several boards and hold advisory roles, what do you see as the most pressing issues facing the creative music sector today?
There are so many…

Climate change is a major issue, and I curate and produce work in this area to raise awareness and to celebrate the natural world. I sit on the board of Making Tracks — the environmentally-focused music exchange programme — they are doing interesting grassroots work.

Mobility is important for artists and we need to avoid shaming people for travelling by air when it is important for their livelihood. 

There’s a sustainability issue — arts workers are rarely paid properly for the amount of work they do and the expertise they have, even though many economies benefit hugely from the work of the creative sector.

Supply and demand is also an issue — universities keep producing graduates but there's not enough work for them (or for established artists). This model really needs addressing. 

Then there’s funding —  the amount available seems to be dwindling every year and is a threat to individuals and small organisations, especially post-pandemic when they are already trying to do more with less. There’s often a demand for match funding — which seems to be increasing in some territories — and a massive obligation around reporting for organisations and for individuals.  All of which can compromise the time you need to create and present work to audiences.

Which women (including non-binary) artists are you most excited about at the moment,  or would you recommend our members check out?
Australian Xani Kolac, a charismatic improviser, collaborator, singer, songwriter and electric violin player, soon to be showcasing at Tallinn Music Week 2025.

Also from Australia, Sia Ahmed, a songwriter, improviser, curator and record label owner. I’ve been unofficially mentoring Sia for a few years and some words from Sia can be found on the Arts & Parts website.
 
From the UK, Brìghde Chaimbeul on the Scottish small pipes — wow! — go and see her live at the 2025 Monheim Trienniale. And Olivia Murphy, one of the rising stars of the UK jazz scene. Olivia is a composer, conductor, improviser who runs her own big band.


Image credits: Emile Holba