20 May 2019
By Sharon Mearing – Visual Arts Teacher (retired)
Rohan Stephens graduated from Smith’s Hill High School in 2006. As well as Visual Arts, Rohan took four units of English, Modern History and Legal Studies in Year 12.
When I tracked Rohan down I was delighted to learn about his current situation, living and working in London, U.K. His job title of “Touring Exhibitions Manager & Regional Advisor for South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa - Visual Arts British Council” was proof of his continued engagement with the Visual Arts.
Rohan’s life has been an eventful one since leaving Smith’s Hill High School:
‘I moved to Sydney just after I graduated and took a year off before I started studying again at UNSW in 2008. I spent the next four years working odd jobs in bars around the city whilst at Uni but also getting some experience in the art world, working for various private galleries and dealers such as Iain Dawson, Rex Irwin, Ray Hughes and a few of the auction houses like Mossgreen and Sotheby’s.”
Rohan attained a double degree from UNSW; a Bachelor of Art History and a Bachelor of Political Science. A Bachelor of Art History was received from the College of Fine Arts in Paddington.
“Unfortunately, as I was approaching graduation from UNSW, the recession appeared to have taken hold of the market and a lot of the galleries in the city were suffering. Sydney was changing a lot also with property prices skyrocketing and forcing a lot of the young and interesting artists and gallerists out of previously concentrated creative hubs like Darlinghurst and Paddington. So I applied for my British passport (my mother was born in the UK) and started to look for work in Europe.
In August of 2012, I was lucky enough to be considered for a role at Christie’s in London with the offer to start immediately. I flew out about three weeks later and have been here ever since!
I began working for Christie’s in their South Kensington saleroom in the September of 2012 as a technical manager of their saleroom operations which meant I oversaw a team of art techs that would install each auction for viewing prior to a sale. Christie’s back then would have roughly two auctions a week with approximate 150 painting in each sale, so it was quite the turn around. Prices of artworks would range from anything from £1000 up to £10-20 million. They had a separate department for nearly every movement or genre of art you could think of from Impressionist and Modern to Old Masters and Contemporary and then again in objects anything from silver and clocks to film memorabilia and antiquities.
Christie’s is one of the largest auctions houses in the world and has sites across the globe and with London being the hub of the business, we were often required to travel out to other sites to manage the operations of their sale periods. I managed to become involved in the Middle East office’s sales, in Dubai starting in 2014.
In 2015 I took a role at an Operations Manager at one of Christie’s contractors that provided all their logistics services in the Middle East. The company also held contracts with businesses like Art Dubai and Dubai Design Days which I worked with also throughout 2016.
From there I began working for the British Council in 2017 as their Touring Exhibitions Manager, and a visual arts advisor for South Asia and the Middle East, where I am today. British Council is the United Kingdom’s department for cultural relations and works closely with the Foreign Commonwealth Office in helping to create opportunities to engage with and promote British culture abroad.”
I remember Rohan as a very hard working and creative student with a keen sense of design exercised in his graphic based artwork which already showed an eye for visual design and the power of images to communicate.
I am not an artist myself. I studied art history, however, I don’t consider myself an artist. More an admirer of art than anything. I enjoy working with artists more than making it.
Rohan has developed a career that involves him in the visual arts all over the world, allowing him to travel and work closely with artists and curators. During my recent contact with him, he was in the throes of a team setting up the British Artist’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale for 2019.
“I am always drawn to working on really big, multi-country projects that involve working abroad in interesting environments with new teams and challenging situations. I am on the project team for the delivery of the Venice Biennale each year for the United Kingdom, at the British Council, which has been a great experience. I have worked a lot with art biennale’s in South Asia from the Karachi and Lahore Biennale in Pakistan to the Kochi Biennale in India and the Dhaka Art Summit in Bangladesh. I have also worked on delivering art projects across the Middle East such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman.
I think all that considered, what I’m most chuffed about is the places I’ve been able to work and the people I meet in these countries. For a boy that grew up sitting on the beach in Woonona, to have been able to carve out a career that facilitates seeing so much of the world, has been incredibly special.”
What advice would you have for your 17/18 year old self?
“Be patient. What I remember most about being 17/18 is just being in such a hurry to finish things; finish school, finish Uni. I saw all these things as such a hurdle to what I considered to be ‘real life,’ and was just so eager to get to the next point or milestone. There’s something to be said for being ambitious and always keeping one eye on the prize and all that, but when it starts to affect your ability to live in the moment and be present, you need to check yourself.”
Is there anything else or some advice you would like to share with the current high school generation?
“If you’re privileged to be on this earth long enough, you will have a multitude of lives within one lifetime. People talk a lot about career ‘paths’ as if it’s one linear trajectory that you strap yourself in for at 18 and then alight from at 65. But it couldn’t be further from the truth.
What you decide to study in year 12 doesn’t dictate what you can study at university and what you study at university doesn’t dictate what you can or can’t do for a living in the real world. And equally, just because you’ve done something for X amount of years, doesn’t mean you can’t decide to do something else whenever it might please you. I am a living example of not ever having had a career that fits nicely into a tick box on a tax form, but it’s one that’s allowed me to travel wide and far, live comfortably and not be chained to a desk 9-5.”
The photographs Rohan has supplied show him going about his work setting up for art auctions, consulting with colleagues and handling well-known artworks. He has also very generously supplied an email address for “anyone reading this (that) is interested in learning more about working in this sector…”
“I am going to leave my email, because one thing I always believe in since I started out in this industry is helping whoever else wants to join it. I’ve been lucky enough in my life to have had people answer the right emails or pick up the phone at just the right time that has got me a job just when I needed it and I am a firm believer in returning the karma. So… please don’t hesitate to get in touch.”
What would you say Smith's Hill HS did for you? Is there any special feature that attending there in your senior HSC years that you would not have got elsewhere?
“This makes me sound ancient, but I think it speaks more so to the current state of things, when I say, and genuinely mean that the world seems like an incredibly different place now than when I was at school. You have to remember that we were one of the last generations of kids to have gone through school without social media, or at the very least, gone through school without social media as it is and what it means now. And for all its failings, one thing that social media seems to have done is create more of an acceptance or at least an awareness of queer culture and queer issues. This just didn’t really exist back in 2005. And especially didn’t exist in Wollongong.
Without explicitly claiming to do so, Smiths Hill provided a haven for kids like me, to freely and openly tap into our creativity and expression without feeling threatened or ostracized for it. I spent a long time at another school prior to joining SHHS and I know first-hand what it’s like to consciously hide or mask things (for which) you may feel passionate all for the sake of not drawing attention to yourself. I can’t tell you what it meant to me to see my friends, guys and girls, straight, gay, whatever, doing things like Rock-Eisteddfod, drama, debating etc., and just enjoying it for what it was. These things just didn’t exist where I had come from previously and my only regret is that I wasn’t able to be a part of it sooner.”
