“PRACTICE over PRODUCT”
WHAT IS RUPTURE MENTORING?
We help you take a hard look at what makes a “creative practice,” (art practice, writing practice, or underwater basket weaving practice) not at “how to get a gallery or agent, sell your work or ‘navigate the art or writing world’.”
There is nothing wrong with seeking guidance for developing the business side of your career, and there are plenty of places ready to help. In fact, the market is saturated with people who are ready to tell you how to navigate the art and writing/publishing world, network and sell more.
At Rupture, we think all artists and writers should be able to make a living from their work. But that’s not what we are focused on. How are you going to make a living if you don’t know why you are making work? Why you’ve chosen a specific medium, what you want to be talking about, and whether you are talking about what you want to be talking about. What are the conditions that allow work to arise? How do you keep those conditions constant in your life? How do you learn to live your practice? How do you know you should? These are critical questions to ask - BEFORE you worry about selling.
How do I establish and keep a practice going with everything else going on in my life?
How do I know if my practice matters and is producing work that matters?
How do I struggle less and get more joy out of the process of creating?
How do I learn to trust my skill set so I can just create?
How do I stop judging myself based on what I can sell?
How do I connect to my deeper creative purpose in a way that is secure?
How do I build discipline so my practice is stable?
How do I know that I’m worth all the effort resources and energy I am putting into my art?
At Rupture, we are interested in practice. What it means to have a practice. Building it, rebuilding it, examining it, deepening it, blowing it apart, and starting again. We are interested in the life-long formation of the artist and writer at work. We are here to help you discover your depth, make friends with your fear, and grow the roots of a practice that excites you, challenges you, and grows with you for the rest of your life.
Over the past five years, the Rupture team has worked with over 1,000 international creatives at all stages of their careers, providing a prolific platform for artistic growth and collaboration.
We meet everyone where they need to be met, and provide the time, space, and rigor to examine and expand individual practices.
If you are excited about asking and seeking answers to questions like those above, it’s time to reach out.
Kate, Sally, James, and Anna are available for art mentoring and writing mentoring Practice Mentoring sessions. Meetings are held via zoom or in person, with mentors working one on one to address your specific challenges.
Sessions with Sally or Anna are £75 VAT inclusive for 50 minutes individually, or six sessions for £375 VAT inclusive paid in advance (one session free!). Sessions with Kate or James are £98 per session or 6 sessions for £490 (one session free!).
Unsure if Practice Mentoring is right for you? All prospective clients meet with a member of the team for a no-cost 20 minute consultation to confirm that it is a good fit for everyone.
One-on-One Practice Mentoring
"Sally and Kate have been fabulous mentors so far! I feel like they have given me a sense of direction after I had come to a natural stop in my art-making and their emphasis on inner work has been particularly illuminating. Would 100% recommend.” Verity, 2024
All kinds of artists, writers included, are invited to join Kate and Sally for Examining and Expanding your ART Practice workshops, where we talk about what practice is, how to make one, how to change one, how to let go of fear, and how to stop asking if the work is good enough.
WORKSHOP: Examining and Expanding Your ART Practice
The insights and conversations from the workshop continue to resonate in my own practice… I left the workshop feeling so connected to my authentic artist self, like magic." Workshop attendee 2024
Writers and Artists of all types are invited to work with Dr. James and Dr. Anna in their writing workshops. Bring your curiosity to the writing room, and see how far you can push your writing practice, reflect on and define your practice, and expand your practice into and through writing.
Workshop:
New colours and flashes of meaning: Looking at language anew to invigorate (or kick-start!) your writing practice
Anna will offer a nurturing, non-judgemental space in which to explore language and access new seams of inspiration. Suitable for both experienced and brand new writers. In this two hour workshop we’ll take familiar words and follow poet and activist Adrienne Rich’s call to turn them to the light ‘for new colours and flashes of meaning’.
Through a series of writing exercises, we will build towards fragments of language that might just be the beginning of something, gathering these fragments to see where they might take us. Throughout the workshop there will be opportunities (but no pressure!) to share and discuss the work you produce in the exercises
WORKSHOP: Examining and Expanding Your WRITING Practice
SPARKCrit
Artist crits are often absent from our professional practices post education, so following the success of our group crits during our open call shows and residencies, we're currently focusing the energies of the studio on artists developing their individual practices.
Alongside bespoke practice mentoring, we have found crits to be the most powerful tool to help artists at all stages of their careers. The crits will be held in the intimacy of our back studio space, where Kate and Sally will lead the sharing of work and supportive discussion with other artists.
Please bring a piece of work or images of the work.
“The atmosphere of involvement was refreshing—where my voice was heard and valued. I felt a sense of responsibility for my work and gained tremendous motivation to continue pushing boundaries. The critique event expanded my perspective on my artistic identity, allowing me the freedom to discuss my art openly”. Anna Kiparis, 2024
Here at RuptureXIBIT, we offer artists an affordable space in which to expand and define their practice during a four-week intensive mentoring residency concluding with an open studio event. This is an opportunity to push your practice and show experimental and unresolved work and talk about it across disciplines and communities devoid of hierarchy. Experimental means experimental to you: how you ask more of your practice.
We accept proposals based on the artist’s desire to develop through experimenting and showing. RuptureXIBIT is interested in the new and believes the new comes from an engagement with a willingness to stretch, push, and fail. We are a lab, a workout space, a place to try things you are unsure of. We are your trampoline.
We’re currently accepting residency proposals for our 350 sq. ft. High Street shop-front gallery. This intensive mentoring residency consists of four weeks of studio/gallery space, plus four 90 minute mentoring sessions and the opportunity to be part of our studio community. It includes access to our workshops and group crits and the more informal support that comes with working from the studio. Plus, we offer promotion of the residency and open studio across numerous platforms and full support from our experienced in-house team.
Ready for more?
Discover our Intensive Mentoring Residency
Once a quarter, we will host Invitational Artists in Residence.
These residencies offer space and time for artists with established practices to interrogate or try something out.
Invitational Resident Artists are required as a condition of their month long residency only to give one artist’s talk and hold one open studio.
No final work needs to be produced, the artist can choose to hold a show if they would like to.
Know someone who this is the perfect fit for? Nominate an artist now.
Invitational Artist in Residence Program
Meet the Mentors
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Kate Howe
(they/them)
Mentor, Artist in Residence and Founding Director.
Kate Howe is an American Artist living and working in London. Their work is the result of a research-based practice that examines relationships to self and others through the lens of longing, loss, power, and control.
As the founder of Kate Howe Studios and RuptureXIBIT, Kate is the person who stands watch over the excitement that occurs at the studio and gallery whilst they pursue their artistic goals.
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Sally Minns
(she/her)
Mentor, Artist in Residence, Partner in Practice, and Gallery Director
Sally Minns is a London-based Artist and has joined RuptureXIBIT as Kate’s Business Partner, bringing her creative and business experience to the team. Sally develops opportunities to offer emerging artists, which include affordable exhibition spaces, mentoring, and residencies. Sally also leads community outreach, growing RuptureXIBIT's links with local artists and the London art world, all while pursuing her own creative practice.
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Dr. James Miller
(he/him)
Dr. James Miller is the author of the novels LOST BOYS (Little, Brown 2008), SUNSHINE STATE (Little, Brown 2010) UNAMERICAN ACTIVITIES (Dodo Ink 2017).
He is senior lecturer in creative writing at Kingston university and has a PhD on James Baldwin and civil rights.
His short fiction has appeared in many anthologies. As an activist, he is a founding member of the activist group Writers Rebel and ran Twitter for Extinction Rebellion for several years. He is interested in literary, experimental and quality genre writing and writing that blurs the boundaries between fiction and theory.
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Dr. Anna Johnson
(they/she)
Anna is a writer, poet, lecturer, and mother, with a background in visual art. Anna’s prose/poetry life writing practice centres around the complexity and ambivalence of motherhood experience, haunting, and failure. They draw on, amongst other things, disability theory, queer and feminist theory.
Anna explores the ways in which we attempt to express difficult-to-articulate experiences, such as the strangeness of early motherhood. They have published broadly within maternal studies and as a poet. Their full-length prose-poetry work, Motherhood: A Ghost Story, (as Anna Brook) is out with Broken Sleep Books in September 2025.
Anna lectures in creative writing and English literature at Kingston University, where they have also recently completed their PhD in creative writing. In addition, they run writing workshops, are a guest editor of Studies in the Maternal journal and co-founder of the Visceral Bodies research network.
Testimonials from our Mentoring Workshops & Sessions