Jessie Leov

I recently had the privilege of performing at the Auckland Writers Festival Poetry and Music event, held at the Limelight Room in the Aotea Centre on 21 May. This collaborative event featured the shortlisted works of poetry from this year’s Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, pairing the four finalist poets with four musicians from the 2023 Ockham Collective.

Working with poet Joanna Cho was a wonderful experience – together we put together a nine-minute performance intertwining two of her poems with original music that I performed on the piano. The event ended up being sold out and it was a really inspiring evening. Watch the video of our performance here (apologies for the recording quality).

You can read more about the event here. 

I’m beyond thrilled to share that my recent application for a CNZ Arts Grant, a joint application with sonic artist Garling Wu, was successful! We will be working together over the next 12 months on a really exciting creative collaboration. We’ll be composing 45 mins of new music together, bringing together our respective backgrounds in contemporary composition and sonic arts.

As emerging artists this is a huge milestone in our careers. We put a huge amount of work into the application and we’re so grateful to have been given this funding. I’ll be sharing more details as things progress so watch this space!

You can check out the full list of grant recipients here. 

 

Since February I have been leading a project at Pukekohe High School as part of Creatives in Schools; an initiative currently in its fourth year which brings together schools and creatives to deliver inspiring learning experiences for students based around the arts. It’s led by the Ministry of Education in partnership with the Ministry for Culture and Heritage Te Manatū Taonga and Creative New Zealand.

I approached Head of Music Steve Granshaw last year to see if he’d be interested in collaborating on this project and together we came up with a proposal based around a two-term aiming to foster creativity and collaboration through songwriting. In December we found out our proposal was successful which was really exciting. We got off to a rocky start with the flooding in Auckland delaying the start of the school term, but as we’ve gained monentum it’s been rewarding to see the engagement of the students and their commitment to trying something new. In Term Two we’ll start recording their songs which is a process I’m very much looking forward to.

To see the full list of schools taking part in the initiative this year, click here.

This year I have the privilege of being a member of the Ockham Collective, along with 11 other creatives from around Tāmaki Makaurau, representing a range of artistic disciplines. The Ockham Collective is an annual residency programme which offers artists such as myself free use of several fantastic creative spaces to create, rehearse, teach, run workshops, and so on.

I applied late last year, attended an interview and was thrilled to be invited to join. Once a month all the creatives gather at the main Ockham space, The Nix, for a korero so I’m looking forward to getting to know everyone and hearing more about their creative practice.

There are some exciting collaboration opportunities on the cards as part of the residency which I’ll share more about in due course. For now I’m enjoying using the Ockham spaces to get into some focussed creative work in a distraction-free environment as well as for rehearsals with a couple of different groups I’m part of.

More to come on this as the year progresses!