She skipped the cultural buzz of London life when Claudia Zeiske arrived in the market town of Huntly with her young family nearly 30 years ago. She searched for a nearby arts center around her and found that there was none. Prior to pursuing a career in human rights work with the British Refugee Council in London, Zeiske had studied social anthropology in Berlin and London. As she says, while living in northeast Scotland at the time, focusing on human rights was not a choice. At the National Galleries of Scotland’s Duff House in nearby Banff, she took a position as a construction manager, but still craved the artistic buzz of the arts on her doorstep. She decided to create an arts center herself after many discussions over food and wine with like-minded peers. “At first, my ideas were quite traditional,” she recalls. “It was about taking art that was being created and shown in a city and bringing it to a smaller version in the country.”
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