A residency can play a vital role for the arts practitioner, potentially providing some of the key elements that artists need to develop their work and careers.

In this article artist Dallas Seitz talks about his experiences practicing as a curator and the relationship between this role and his career as an artist.

The question of what makes an artist 'professional' is often debated. While professionalism in relation to arts practice is a lot to do with attitude and approach, there are certain basic resources you can develop to operate in a professional manner and help you develop your career.

A curator is most often an arts professional with a background in the visual arts, either attached to a gallery or operating on a freelance basis working with different private, public or independent spaces.

So how do you get to meet a curator? The bottom line is we look like everyone else and we rarely wear badges.

The easiest and most effective way to grow your own network is to use the network you already have.

Amongst many other sources of information on curators, their role, and how to find them, the following may be of interest:.

You should decide on a short- or long-term focus for your peer mentoring group and arrange speakers around this theme, or you may decide to simply talk about each members' work, one at a time.

Your audiences are all the people interested in your work, either to look at, collect, put into exhibitions or write about.

Many artists forget that it is part of a gallery curator's job to find artists to exhibit, and that it is much better to put yourself in a position where your work can be seen or where you can be introduced to them.