Artists’ lives: Ecologies for resilience

Qualitative and longitudinal research into visual artists’ motivations and ambitions for their lives and art practices reveals the vital importance of having time, space and money for professional reflection and to make artistic progress.

But individual artists have been getting scant help to achieve this from arts funders whose emphasis remains on ensuring arts organisations are resilient, at the expense of artists.

Conducted over a seven-year period through interviews with fourteen artists from three English regions, Artists’ lives: ecologies for resilience highlights the credibility gap between arts policy’s creative industries and ‘artists as service industry’ stance and demonstrates the conditions artists need to realise their multiple contributions to communities and society.

Seeking authentic opportunities

Arts Council England’s assumption since austerity in 2010 has been that resilience is an institutional matter, reliant for achievement on arts organisations with strong leaders, traditional governance and neo-liberalist business models. 

Contrary to policy’s associated generic, conglomerated view of creative practitioners, visual artists aren’t entrepreneurial and business-minded by nature. Artists’ expectations, social beliefs and life goals don’t revolve around achieving higher levels economic reward, nor do their motives lie in traditional business growth and profitability.

Significantly, the Creative PEC’s 2021 Creating value in place intimated that individuals predominantly motivated by financial reward – who are good at being self-employed, well-versed in application writing and have ready-to-buy lines of work and so on – are the most likely to depart the arts for work providing a more stable income.

It’s neither irregular bits of income from a series of gigs nor a lucrative side hustle that artists are looking for, but authentic opportunities to make artistic progress and realise their social and community ambitions.

“The driver for absolutely everything I do is a fascination with people, what they believe in, how they behave and what makes them who they are. I guess you could say it’s a continual enquiry into how we as human beings relate to one another, how we think, process stuff and express ourselves.

“Our world is characterised by multiple crises now – with capitalist economics and power imbalances the major cause. So, it’s ideas about increasing social access and enabling inclusivity that run through my own practice as well as when I work collaboratively with people who share my beliefs and values.” Olivia

A deliberate counter to sectoral evaluation trends

This study’s vignettes bring everyday artists living in North and South West England and London to life. This is a deliberate counter to sectoral evaluation tendencies to follow artistic excellence agendas and capture only the experiences of successful artists, such as grant or commission recipients who are known to funders, institutions and gatekeepers, and to talk up the successes.

Anonymisation of contributors to the study enables them to talk freely about their human characteristics including the daily impacts of their neurodivergence and chronic conditions, their social circumstances including difficulties managing serious art practices around social responsibilities for child and eldercare, illness and family bereavement.

We hear what navigating the uncertain world of contemporary visual arts is really like – the highlights and the truly debilitating parts as experienced on a daily basis and over time.

“We don’t really have honest conversations about money and how artists can make living – there’s a kind of toxic positivity. But as a neurodivergent person not fresh out of university I’m sick of that and having to justify who I am and what I do. It’s just exhausting.

“I know you’ve got to create your own opportunities, but that’s easier for some than others. As it stands, there’s a lot of smoke and mirrors in the arts and between artists themselves. It seems like it’s the artists who’re propping up the arts organisations by keeping quiet about the bad treatment.” Emily

Conflict between values, scope and competition

Tensions in artists’ everyday lives lie in the persistent conflict between the values they must live by if they are to be artists at all, and the narrow scope and high competition levels for art commissions and research-based residencies and paucity of research-based grants.

At the same time, the volume of paid work has steadily reduced, with opportunities – if advertised at all – becoming decreasingly attractive in artistic and economic value terms. As illustrated by this call on Arts Jobs in February (below), artistic and financial success in arts and cultural organisations – including their credibility with funders – has become reliant on a steady flow of skilled, flexible and skilled freelancers but on a cheap just-in-time basis. In these circumstances, it’s the artists who’re easy to work with, willing to work for whatever they’re offered, who are more likely to get appointed.

Current ecologies for the contemporary visual arts privilege those with financial, social and educational means to withstand the structural and economic uncertainties. Get­ting a commission or exhibition offer has become far less about the quality of an individual’s work than on their informal knowl­edge and con­tacts and their friendships. 

Based on her own experiences as an artist Lucy Wright describes how this harsh ecology undermines artists’ livelihood prospects and their personal well-being in equal measure.

“Painful scarcity of funding and opportunities means that we’re all in a Hunger Games-type competition, whether we like it or not – and that doesn’t feel very much like care, whichever way you spread it.”

Marginalisation of artists

In the face of standstill government funding and Covid impacts, the Arts Council has stuck to its now highly questionable trickle-down principles and prioritised funding to established, traditionally run arts organisations.

The result is marginalisation of individual artists in the infrastructures of the arts and culture with only lip service paid to their R&D funding needs through the highly competitive grant scheme Developing Your Creative Practice.

“Making applications is so time-intensive and forms that ask for multiple answers to a specific word count are the worst. I work fast, but it’s easy to spend a week on an application and then have a very small chance of being chosen. With grants from Arts Council England, I almost feel like I’d need an expert to help – someone who knows exactly how to fill out that kind of application. There’s a complete disconnect – like it’s more about how capable you are of filling out an application than whether your work actually merits a grant. it’s just unfair when the bar’s set extremely high.” Amelia

It’s significant too that even when practising full time, even artists at mid career, whose incomes derive entirely from generating projects and pitching for commissions, still struggle to maintain regular and sufficient annual income.

“I want to earn £35,000 like a professional can, because then I could save money. [But] It’s really hard as an artist and so unpredictable. Earnings on my tax return last year were £10,000, but about £20,000 the year before. The difference was I lost four months with illness. I’ve always had to rely a lot on my partner financially – he pays the lion’s share of domestic bills and for holidays. When I had some unexpected health-related costs he paid for them too.” Nancy

Pursuit of intrinsic values

While resilience is an economic and ‘good programming’ matter for policy and arts institutions, this research shows it’s far more nuanced for individual artists. A key contributor to their staying power is their preference – as Virani and Orrù describe it – to be “individuals not firms”.

Participants showed little interest in behaving like creative industries companies who typically meet greater market demand by scaling-up resources and outsourcing production. Rather, visual artists seek to ‘right scale’, this because art practice only retains rigour, quality and makes progress for them when they maintain control, keeping everything in house within a manageable scope and size.

Furthermore, artists’ enduring motivations rest on pursuit of intrinsic values including self-worth, caring for others and the drive for personal growth. Rather than pursuit of fame and fortune, it’s these drivers that underpin artists’ lives, with their art practices viewed as a lifetime pursuit in which deeply held beliefs about the social and psychic value of art provide emotional sustenance and fortitude.

“Pursuing things against all odds and keeping up a flow of ideas – it’s a sort of resilience for me, I suppose. When stuff happens that’s out of my control, when I don’t feel like myself, the best thing I can do is immerse myself in my work.” Susannah

Framing the future

While artists value precious immersion in the processes of thinking, testing and producing – and CVAN’s visual arts advocacy plan Framing the future endorses this when making the case to government for extra funding to artists’ studios at the grassroots – a key finding from this study is that current arts ecologies are systematically squeezing and reducing artists’ practice and studio time.

Although 44% of visual artists rent external studio space to create an important distinction between domestic and professional lives, most artists regardless of career stage spend most of their time not on art practices in studios.

“I probably average twelve hours a month in my studio – a tiny fraction of what it was before Covid and the cost-of-living crisis. I’m teaching in two art schools in different places, but the workload means my two-day-a-week job takes four and there are many weeks where I just don’t get to go to the studio at all.” Mid-career artist

By continuing to endorse an arts ecology premised on economic values rather than social responsibility, Arts Council policies compound the structural deficiencies of the creative industries already well-documented by Brook, O’Brien and Taylor and Justin O’Connor, among other researchers.

But it’s society in general, and communities around artists in particular, who suffer when rather than on sustained pursuit of their art practices, artists’ talents get wasted on pitching for bits of service industry type work, largely fruitless fundraising efforts and on unrelated income-generating work.

Artists’ lives: Ecologies for resilience has received financial support from CAMP Contemporary Art Membership Platform and Creative Land Trust.