8:50am Thursday 15th July 2010
By Maggie Hartford
Like many children, Brigit Hegarty was fond of creating her own worlds — using sand, pebbles and shells to turn the family greenhouse into a beach, or transforming the attic into outer space with the help of paper moons and rockets.
She grew up wanting to become a set designer. But she has needed plenty of down-to-earth business skills, as well as a vivid imagination, in order to fight her way into a tough, competitive world and create her own dream job. It is something she has wanted as far back as she can remember.
“My mother used to do amateur dramatics and I remember waiting behind the stage with her from the age of four. We used to help make the props. I was brought up on a diet of opera, theatre and ballet, and I did work experience at the Pegasus Theatre, Oxford Playhouse and the Old Fire Station, painting scenery.”
When she left the European School at Culham, she naturally gravitated to art college, taking a foundation course in Banbury, and eventually graduating in product design from Plymouth University.
She followed up her studies with more work experience, ending up as a receptionist, working for an art director who ran a production company.
“I used the time to make a book of contacts, and after six months I went freelance, acting as an assistant set designer.”
Far from painting scenery, she found herself acting as a backroom gofer, organising wardrobe changes and co-ordinating props.
“It’s very intense work,” she said.
Her first breakthrough came when she met someone who designed sets for fashion shoots for glossy magazines.
“She had a job she couldn’t do, so I went instead. It was for Face magazine, which doesn’t exist any more, but it was high-end, trendy stuff and it allowed me to show what I could do.”
Accepting every job she could get, she ended up working in television, but discovered she was at a career dead-end.
“I realised I didn’t want to do TV. In fashion, you have more scope to create your own world. In film or TV, you have to do what the script and story demands. If it’s a good story, that’s fine, but if it’s a soap, you are just making an ordinary room look ordinary. I was doing up a house at the time, and it was just more of the same.
“I wanted to make my own props, rather than being told what to do. I had to get my contacts again, and I collected lots of people like set designers and cold-called them.
“At that stage, you have to sell yourself, making yourself available and meeting people. So much of it is social.”
Faced with a sporadic workload, she created several different sidelines to keep the money flowing, designing perspex rings with personalised pictures and selling them through retailer Octopus, and later undertaking public art projects, including a regeneration project at a Hackney church and sculpture for a shopping arcade in Solihull.
“Alongside that, I was still building up contacts for set design. About ten years ago, I decided I wasn’t going to be an assistant, I would just do my own set design, and I managed to find enough clients.”
Now she is in the position where she can pick and choose her work, not just for magazine fashion editors. She has also built up an impressive list of advertising clients, including many high street shops and big names such as Levi’s.
Not surprisingly, given her battle to establish herself, she has strong views on the interaction between art and business, and one of her aims in future is to open the eyes of art students to the world of set design, having become a visiting teacher at her former university.
“It’s a very competitive world and you need a lot of confidence. It turns you into a hardened business person. It has heightened my knowledge of business and I have developed as a business person almost more than as an artist. I didn’t do a business course, but it’s a huge skill. If you can’t sell yourself and you don’t know how much to sell your work for, people will happily take it for nothing.
“I have worked for nothing to build up a portfolio, but you have to know when to stop. It has definitely not been an easy route.”
Having ended up calling the shots, she is now more relaxed about the future direction of her career. She says there is some truth behind stereotypes of fashion industry people being temperamental and demanding, but she loves the surge of adrenalin from rush jobs and impossible deadlines.
Her involvement with London Fashion Week led to her designing the elegant, minimalist catwalk for this year’s Red Couture Ball, a charity event at last month’s Oxford Fashion Week.
She said: “Fashion can be a bit limiting sometimes, so it’s nice to do something for charity.”
o Contact: 07903 317 675.
Web: www.brigithegarty.com
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