Gem’s Page is Gemma Cairney, a BBC Radio Broadcaster of sorts for over ten years. They have won some awards for some of the work they’ve done. They look back at their career so far and can only describe it, as a bit like swinging on a pendulum from the pretty-serious, to the super-fun. They started young and have learnt a ton. They’ve now been lucky enough to travel lots of the world with their career and are passionate about exploring and learning from culture. They had their first book published in 2017, a kind of bumper ‘life guide’ for young adults designed to dip in and out of, it’s called ‘Open, A Toolkit For How Magic & Messed Up Life Can Be’. With their advance for this book, they bought a 90s double decker bus, painted it yellow and used it as the mode of transport for a schools tour of the book, around the country. They still have the bus and it’s called Dandelion. They also founded a production company a few years ago, it gave them the chance to over-see and exec produce projects from theatre (My Beautiful Black Dog, Parakeet) to radio documentaries. They have a lot of ideas and are drawn to bright, sparkling souls and nature filled landscapes. Their career has changed from just being about fun-seeking, pop culture presenting to mostly writing, producing and talking about arts ‘n culture. They think if they’d told the ‘lil-me’ that they’d have this career – they would have been V happy. In 1994, they were nine years old some of their mum’s very cool and progressive friends were looking after them for a day in a flat in South London. This was a time before the internet. This group of cool women spent an entire day, burning incense, brainstorming and collaging a newspaper they were going to launch. The newspaper was called to be called ‘Diaspora’ and was to be launched soon. Covering a range of topics that would hopefully be of interest to of women of colour. They sat there, all afternoon, young, enthralled and inspired by them and their day’s activity. Their chatter and excitement for their new newspaper was infectious. They asked for a pen and paper of their own. They started to design, their own imaginary page. They started to write an article, about some racist bullying they’d sadly experienced on a summer camp earlier in the holidays, that had effected them deeply. But it wasn’t all sadness, they designed their own word-search (because they thought that’d be fun for the reader), they did a call out for book reviews and included self-drawn, ‘stick man style’ comic strip. They designed a logo for the page, which featured a big flower on the ‘G’ of what they titled Gem’s Page. They were, over all, having a ball being a nine year old designer / journalist. The page was called Gem’s Page. Here, we are twenty four years later.. Well, there’s a lot to say.. But they’ll mostly say this.. In an act of resistance against the tiredness of always having to pitch endless ideas to organizations, institutions, publications, brands etc (which they’ll continue to do, because they like some of them!).. They feel intrigued and excited to have some autonomy over some of the content that they love to communicate. They are not, despite common belief, ‘rich cos they’ve been on the telly’. They love art and culture. They love music. They love to tell stories. They love to host parties. They love to talk. They love, love. \\n
Find Gem’s Page online:
Twitter
https://twitter.com/gemcairn
