Tom Sloan

What years of endurance events, and one unexpected moment with my daughter, taught me about encouragement, environment and achievement. I’ve spent the best part of twenty years taking part in endurance events. Over that time I’ve learned the obvious lessons. Training matters. Preparation matters. Pacing yourself matters. Every event leaves you knowing a little more about your own resilience than you did when you arrived. At least, that’s what I thought I had been learning. This year’s Long...

What World Environment Day can teach us about creativity, influence and the spaces we create for ourselves. World Environment Day usually prompts conversations about sustainability, conservation and our relationship with the natural world. Those conversations matter, but they also make me think about a different type of environment: the environments we create for ourselves and the influence they have on how we think, learn, work and create. It is easy to underestimate the effect our...

A couple of weeks spent preparing for a contemporary Welsh art exhibition left me thinking differently about creativity and process, although not for the reasons I expected. At the beginning of the week, I submitted five pieces of work for the exhibition. Realistically, I am genuinely happy with three of them, which, for most artists, is probably a fairly honest and acceptable outcome. Some pieces arrive exactly as you hoped. Others never quite become what you imagined, no matter how much...