Nakisha Swatton: ENNÈ Artist & Founder of Grounded - Growing Creative Pathways.
- Isobel Arden
- Jun 23
- 5 min read
Updated: Jun 24
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Meet Nakisha Swatton.
In this interview, Mark created Nakisha Swatton's Fantasy Cultural Year from the answers to some easy questions to which there are no wrong answers.
Mark had an imaginary magic wand and a time machine so expect some surprises, laughs, anecdotes and conversational detours.
Nakisha Swatton is one of those creatives who seems incapable of staying in a single lane—mainly because she keeps building new roads.
An artist, creative producer, and mentor working under the name ENNÈ, Nakisha has spent her career moving fluidly between music, visual arts, touring culture, and community-led creative development.
She began in the independent music scene, where she didn’t just participate—she organised. In 2013 she coordinated and toured a UK-wide run of shows with multiple artists and bands, helping to launch careers that are still unfolding today. It was less “first step into the industry” and more “accidentally became the infrastructure.”
From there, her work expanded rapidly into national and international touring, collaborations with Grammy-nominated and award-winning artists, producers and songwriters, and even an unexpected detour into elite performance culture, including recognition in sport at the 2018 X Games USA (because why not add adrenaline to the résumé).
Alongside her own artistic practice in music and visual arts, Nakisha has consistently worked in the background—often quietly shaping the foreground for others. She has delivered workshops in schools, curated live showcases for emerging artists, secured sponsorship for record labels, and helped creatives access opportunities across television, festivals, and recording industries. In short, she builds pathways while walking them.
More recently, her work has expanded into cross-disciplinary cultural development, collaborating with institutions such as the Elgar Festival, ACM Birmingham, and the vocal ensemble Black Voices. These projects focus on co-creation between community musicians and professional artists, blurring the lines between audience, participant, and practitioner.
In response to the gaps she repeatedly saw in creative industries, Nakisha founded Grounded: Growing Creative Pathways in Malvern. The platform exists to support emerging artists through mentorship, fellowships, studio partnerships, and public showcases—rooted in community, but firmly connected to industry. It is, essentially, a structure designed to do what she has always done instinctively: open doors and leave them open.
Her practice sits at the intersection of artistry, mentorship, and cultural infrastructure. Whether she is producing work as ENNÈ or developing systems for other creatives to thrive, Nakisha’s focus remains the same: helping people find their voice, build sustainable creative careers, and avoid the industry’s more creatively unhelpful nonsense along the way.
Nakisha Swatton's Fantasy Cultural Year ... with a magic wand and a time machine to hand.
It begins, appropriately, in an art studio.
Not a grand gallery or marble institution, but a place where everything happens—a studio filled with sketches, half-finished ideas, music in progress, books stacked beside a worn Bible, and the quiet confidence of someone who has stopped trying to "find time" and instead learned to decorate it.
Then, as fantasies often do, the studio moves.
It lands in Jakarta.
The sun is lowering over the city. Nakisha sits outside with sparkling water, surrounded by friends and family, opera flowing through her headphones—Jesse Norman soaring into the evening air. On the table are books on visual arts she never formally studied, because even now she is still learning, still stretching, still becoming.
And then comes the invitation.
A foundation has heard about Grounded.
Not just Grounded in Malvern, but the philosophy beneath it—the belief that young people deserve access to creativity, mentorship, and the freedom to imagine themselves into existence. They ask Nakisha to create Grounded Global: creative spaces across the world for young people aged 11 to 25, places where art isn't an extracurricular activity, but a language of belonging.
She doesn't hesitate.
Bangalore is next.
There, she builds alongside communities she already loves, sharing stories over authentic Indian cuisine, listening only to opera and choral music for an entire year because, for Nakisha, these forms contain everything—music, movement, storytelling, faith, and emotion woven into one experience. She speaks about Psalm 48 and Edward Elgar, about how great art bridges centuries and invites reinvention.
Tokyo follows.
She watches gymnastics like choreography, fascinated by bodies that speak without words. Every discipline she encounters becomes another expression of artistry. The categories no longer matter. Music is movement. Movement is story. Story is culture.
In Abuja, she enters a gallery unlike any other.
She steps inside Vincent van Gogh's skies.
Not to admire them, but to understand them. To see what he saw: the stars, the alignment, the future hidden within the present moment. She recognises something familiar there—a visionary instinct, the courage to create for a time not yet arrived.
Because Nakisha has always been building ahead of herself.
Back in London, she spends evenings crossing centuries and genres: a Jimi Hendrix concert at Woodstock; A Midsummer Night's Dream beneath the stars; opera houses alive with orchestras warming up; and, inevitably, another viewing of The Fifth Element—the film that first made her fall in love with opera through the impossible voice of the Blue Diva.
That fusion remains her signature.
Classical and contemporary.
Professional and community.
Heritage and innovation.
Faith and imagination.
It lives in her work with Elgar Reimagined, in the Reimagined Orchestra she is building, and in Grounded itself—a movement where young artists are not asked to fit into existing systems, but are invited to create new ones.
Because Nakisha Swatton is not simply a multidisciplinary artist.
She is, perhaps as she laughingly named herself, a "multimath"—someone who composes a life across many disciplines, and who understands that culture is not something we inherit unchanged.
It is something we nurture. Together.
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Mark Walmsley FRSA FCIM AGSM
Chief Culture Vulture
Arts & Culture Network
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