Iona Bielby is a final year student who I view as the epitome of a St Andrews ‘girl boss’. Now 23 years old, Iona has spent a gap year studying art history in Europe, attending Sotheby’s Institute of Art, and a year studying in Paris before taking on an Art History degree here in St Andrews. Now, Iona is the founder of her own business, New Fine Art Exchange (NFAE). NFAE connects customers with young, exciting artists, offers people affordable art, and allows artists a space to share their work. On a September morning, I sat down with Iona to discuss her business, brand and feminist outlook on life.
Where did the idea for NFAE come from?
While attending Sotheby’s, I discovered that there is an entire market of young people who don’t really know what it means to buy art. There is this group of really cool, educated young people, who I found mostly to be women, who have blank spaces on their walls which they don’t fill with anything other than Amazon posters. I decided that I wanted to build something for those women right here in St Andrews. The women here are so driven, so supportive, have incredible fashion sense and are interested in really cool things. To me, the ideal customer for NFAE is a St Andrews girl.
How do you find your artists?
What we do is try to predict the next trends in art, which is really tough. Creativity is a very hard thing to quantify, which makes it even more difficult to put into an algorithm – things change, politics changes, we change, our minds about things, our experiences change. So what we try to do is predict those kinds of things by looking at trends on Instagram, mostly, and we look at who our consumers are following.
Once our team has analysed that data, the task becomes finding artists that match the trends in some way. Artists that look good together, for example
The next challenge becomes promoting artists in a way that aligns them to my brand. There’s no magic behind this part, I just scroll through Instagram for hours and hours and I find people in the most stalkerish ways. I would like to make the artist pool more diverse – I’m very conscious of that fact. In fact, I have a team dedicated to exactly that- sourcing artists who might otherwise be missed. That’s my favourite part: sitting down and looking through pages and pages of artists.
How do you run the blog, another element of your business?
Due to time management more than anything, I have hired people to do the writing for the blog. I used to write for the St Andrews Art History magazine, and I loved it. That gave me a really good background for this, as well as the tools to say ‘I know what works well in an art history and commercial sense- this works and this doesn’t’. Essentially, I know what a good piece looks like, and that really streamlines the whole process!
What about F*CK THE CANON?
F*CK THE CANON was started because I felt like I wasn’t doing enough to promote diversity. NFAE was born around the time of the murder of George Floyd. I wanted to make sure I was entering the space with an active conversation, especially because the art world is so white and so poor at recognising that there is anything else out there. And especially considering how we consume art history and how it is taught – I have never had a black professor in art history, ever. I think there is something fundamentally wrong with how we consume it and how we study it, in that we get taught it from a purely Western perspective. If I, as a business owner, am trying to represent Gen Z or millennials, then I absolutely need to stand for something bigger than myself. Not only is it the right thing to do, but that is what people now expect.
F*CK THE CANON was started to highlight artists that were never really given the credit they deserve: some are alive, some are dead, and we change it up every week.
That’s also been really successful, and I’ve liked the dialogue that has surrounded it.
Do you have a woman, or a group of women who inspire you the most?
100 percent, my mom. That’s it, that is the inspiration; my mother. My mum grew up in a rough part of Glasgow and worked her way up the corporate ladder. She is so hard-working, intelligent, and intuitive, and consequently comes up in maybe every conversation I have!
I also love that I can constantly ask her for business advice. In fact, I ran all of my NFAE ideas through her before I initially launched. My mum is definitely a massive asset for me, both professionally and personally.
Do you have any advice for the women of St Andrews?
The biggest advice would be to a) know your worth, b) know that the women around you are your friends not your competition and c) watch out for one another.
Personally, I am by no means perfect in regards to following my own advice – I’m quite bad in the sense that I feel my natural way is to look at other women as competition, and I think that’s such an ugly aspect of femininity. I think it’s really natural, especially given societal pressures and norms. That said, what I find particularly interesting about this generation is that we know the difference between how society has told us to be and how we should actually be.
Overall, I would say stick with the women in your community because not only are they sick, but they will become your closest allies.
Instagram: @newfineartexchange @heyitsiona