ANYONE CAN…

Poster by Jonah Williams. Featuring - Jonah, Reuben, Leon and Betsy.

‘… like the worst Radiohead song ever…’

Reuben Nelson maguire

After briefly considering beginning this article devoted to ‘Anyone Can…’ – a key strand of Vault Artist Studios’ Mutual Flux programme – with a quote from the song that inspired its title (‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’ by Radiohead), I changed my mind (on reading the lyrics) and opted for quoting Reuben instead. Throughout the ‘Anyone Can…’ programme, he – along with fellow instigators Betsy, Jonah, and Vault member Leon – found themselves at that pivotal point between leaving school or beginning their jouney in higher education, yet still several years younger than Yorke when he sang ‘grow my hair / I wanna be [...] Jim Morrison’. Questionable lyrics aside, the title proved remarkably flexible for workshop titles like ‘Anyone Can… Write A Poem’, ‘Anyone Can… Produce Propaganda’, and subsequent iterations dedicated to clowning, cyanotype prints, zine making, and concluding (sort of) with ‘Anyone Can… Die’, which focused on eulogy writing.

Poster by Helen Gomez

         The background to the workshops was Mutual Flux, an artist development programme run by, and for, artists. Over the course of several meetings, Laura Nelson, who spearheaded the initiative (made possible with a grant from Belfast City Council) identified relevant topics, skills and facilitators from among Vault’s members. Workshops were then scheduled in subjects such as finance for creatives; arts facilitation training; coaching sessions for creatives; group crits; as well as more specific skill shares, such as sessions dealing with navigating one’s creative journey (‘Pick Our Brainz’); making live work; linocut printing; printing with recycled materials; 3D digital modelling; creating video content and engaging fans; signwriting (‘Introduction to Casual Lettering’); writing (‘Throughlines’ – still ongoing); stencil-cutting; performance art; and sound art (‘Do Weird Stuff in Town)’. There was also ALINE (‘Artist Led Initiative Networking Event’) – a drop-in public event exploring the artist-led scene in Belfast and how to get involved – which brought together Vault representatives with those from University of Atypical, QSS, PS2, Platform Arts, Digital Arts Studios (DAS), Creative Exchange Artist Studios, and Catalyst Arts.

Visual minutes by Helen Gomez

Poster by Rob Hilken

Poster by Leo Boyd

Poster by Leo Boyd

Browsing through, on the Vault website, the impressive range of sessions covered over the course of 2025, it is the regular ‘Anyone Can…’ events that jump out. The handwritten posters, each one unique, with blasts of colour and young faces, appear like a regular heartbeat throughout the programme. ‘It was the most successful part of it in a way’, reflects Laura on Mutual Flux in general, ‘because it was the young ones doing a monthly programme by themselves — by and for young people’.

So how did it all start? Reuben explains that originally, they planned that the funding (only £100 per workshop) be used for ‘a continuation of poetry clubs that we’d been running ourselves’ on a monthly basis. However, plans soon changed to having a new subject or discipline each month. ‘I think we just had way too many ideas. That’s why we had to do a sequence of workshops’, he adds.

Each of the organisers brought their own experience and expertise to the sessions – Jonah wanted to do propaganda, Betsy took the lead on the cyanotype idea, Leon was into writing and Reuben clowning – but in many cases they first had to learn what they wanted to teach and then figure out how to pass this on to the participants, which sometimes numbered between twenty to thirty. Some of the processes they worked out were innovative, turning for example, the process of writing poetry (typically considered an introspective and solitary pursuit) into a group effort, drawing on Dada and Surrealist techniques of exquisite corpse and collage. Or the zine workshop where each person designed the cover of their zine, which they then passed on to the next person to make the following page based on the cover, and so on. ‘In the end, everyone had a zine, but each page was contributed by someone else’. And inevitably there were times where things did not go entirely to plan: ‘The cyanotype one was insane…’, Reuben whispers. Or the clowning workshop, where someone misunderstood and brought their mother along, who did not want to paint her face.

Photo by Betsy Scullion

Roles emerged with Jonah focusing more on the posters and facilitation with Reuben, while Leon would write workshop blurbs. These began as informative texts but later morphed into what sounds more like a series of inspiring departure points or workshop prompts (‘they became like sort of crazy poetic things [that] didn't actually tell you anything about the workshop’). Betsy and Leon also worked on the organisation and running of the sessions as well as documentation. The whole process comes across as organic, or as Reuben puts it:  ‘because no-one was being paid, no-one felt like they had to do anything that they didn’t really want to. Instead you had people just doing things that they actually wanted to do’. 

Anyone Can Write A Poem

Laura gives a sense of the atmosphere of the workshops: ‘Obviously, I'm biased, but walking into the room during the first one (which was about poetry) just felt so special to me because the gallery was just completely full of young people all writing poems together. It didn't feel like something that could be achieved if an ‘older person’ had been present and organising it. The young people were the ones who were doing everything, then all the other young people came to it and took part’. ‘It was actually kind of beautiful to go into the first one’, she adds, ‘and then quickly run away again because I wasn't really supposed to be there’.

Anyone Can Write A Poem

Reuben is not even sure that the ‘workshop’ is the best word to describe what they were doing: ‘We weren’t really teaching [people] that much’, he says. ‘It was more telling them to do the thing, in the space, alongside other people. It was great seeing how much people appreciated that and wanted it.’ If you, like me feel a hankering at this stage for your past selves, wishing something like this had been around for you when you were that age, it is worth taking note of Reuben’s inspiring realisation that if this ‘something that you want to see in your city’ and it is not happening ‘then you have to sort of do it yourself’. This DIY attitude led them to seek, and successfully secure, additional funding from the ‘Bank of Ideas’ initiative to run two final workshops, one on bookbinding, and one dedicated to Reuben’s own love of creating felt puppets (the ‘Anyone Can… Create Life’ workshop). 

To close ‘Anyone Can…’ it seemed natural to organise a group exhibition which, in the spirit of the scheme, the young people curated themselves. This was both an opportunity to show what had been made during the workshops, as well as a chance to invite others in to respond to the themes covered. Brimming with enthusiasm – even when responding to the most popular theme of death! – and using every available space in the gallery (and even spilling out into the foyer) the show really did seem to capture the multidisciplinary, DIY ethos carried all the way through ‘Anyone Can…’.

Poster by Jonah Williams

Would they do it again? ‘At the end, we were thinking about how to keep running them. They weren’t very expensive in terms of materials’, Reuben says. ‘You just needed to be okay with dedicating all your time…’ he laughs. ‘I would do it again though…’, he adds, ‘more facilitating… run more workshops’.

As each young person embarks on a new phase of their lives and their studies, I cannot help imagining their looking back in years to come at what an unique and formative experience this has been for all involved. But that is just the kind of thing an older person would say. For them, now is not about looking back, but rather looking forward. And how anyone can…

Poster by Betsy Scullion

Jonathan Brennan.

To find out more about Anyone Can… and the rest of our year long artist development programme of events just click here: PREVIOUS EVENTS