It is a challenge to be a working artist (curator, producer, programmer, performer, artistic director etc. etc.). It is even more of a challenge when you have responsibilities which tie you to home and tie down your money.
Despite having graduated with an arts degree - and one which in theory should have given me a fair understanding of the inner workings of the art world - for a long time I struggled to fathom how anybody made it work. I was lucky to land a job with an arts charity when I graduated, albeit on part-time hours at minimum wage and via the JobCentre, but I never considered myself a ‘professional’ within the arts. I worked for the same organisation for 2 years, didn’t ‘network’ or build up an ‘artist’s CV’ and hadn’t self-initiated any professional projects since leaving university. So when I unexpectedly became pregnant whilst single less than 2 years after graduating, with no maternity leave and no job to come back to, the odds of returning to creative work were stacked against me.
As always, the personal is political and my experiences can’t be considered outwith the context of gendered care (“with mothers typically leading lone parent families; women with dependent children spending more time on unpaid and household work than men”) or the precarity of working in the arts (the medium hourly wage for artists in the UK is just £2.60). In response to this sociopolitical landscape, Creative Scotland began the action research project, Radical Care which funded 6 Scottish organisations to test-drive new approaches to improve models of access to the arts for parents and those with caring responsibilities.
Reading the evaluation report which was published in March 2024 felt affirming, proving that the issues around access to the arts for people with caring responsibilities is not due to any individual lacking in talent, ambition or will but are rather down to systematic inequalities. This evening, I had a conversation with a friend about an artist we know who’s just returned from a 3 month residency in Nice. The first question that came to my mind was ‘how?’ How did this person afford to take time to do that? Were they paid? Did they still have to cover their rent back home? As a baseline, there is no way I could leave my young family for 3 months to travel abroad, not least because I would miss them, they would miss me and the toll on my partner would be too great. But I also would not be able to take 3 months leave from my non-arts job which pays the bills (barely). The Radical Care Evaluation report shows that I’m not the only one, and that the impacts for career development are keenly felt.
“Not being able to fit this model [of being able to commit to month-long residencies] means turning down residencies, losing opportunities to network and not being able to evidence the career ladder expected of a developing practice.”
The Work Room (TWR) was one of the organisations funded within the project to test a new idea. With a peer group of freelance dance artists their project, RE-EMERGING, resulted in the ‘The Choreography of Parenting’ resource, a guide for freelance artists to self-advocate and for organisations to learn from. Like many of the artists felt about the Radical Care project as a whole, this resource and the event that launched it created a sense of visibility and of viability for working in the arts as parents and/or caregivers. The evaluation report stated that “being part of a Creative Scotland funded project added weight and validity both for the project they were involved with but also for ongoing activity.” It was important that our national arts funding and advocacy body paid attention to parenting and caring as an equalities issue.
However, I can’t help but feel detached from the word ‘re-emerging’. Again, the questions… What about younger artists? What about those who want to change career? What about those with multiple barriers? Could I really argue that I was re-emerging after only 2 years working before giving birth and with no sense of my own practice? It didn’t feel like I was. It only felt like I was ebbing even more.
96% of the Radical Care participants were aged 35 or over. Although not all participants will have been parents (the project’s aims were to explore radical care approaches for parents and caregivers), this is, perhaps, reflective of the increase in age of parents at the point of birth. According to the National Records for Scotland, “Females aged 30 and over accounted for over half of all births in 2019” and “The average age of mothers rose from 26.0 in 1975 to 30.7 in 2019. Similarly, the average age of fathers rose from 28.4 in 1975 to 33.2 in 2019.”
Does this correlate to class? To income? To us living longer? To stigma? How else does this correlate to the arts? To exclusion and inclusion? To representation? There feels to me to be a distinct connection between the age at which someone has their first child and the class they originate from. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows that in 2014 in England and Wales, “Women aged 30 and over were more likely to be in managerial and professional occupational groups than women aged under 30” when they gave birth. This statistic could well be attributed to the likelihood of career progression as we grow older, but I wonder if there is another, deeper, more invisible and hard-to-name reason for, or meaning to glean from, these statistics.
Lynda Aloysius writes in her essay, New Model Army, Behind Tate Modern: Morphological Activism and Working-Class Single Mothers (2018-2019):
“As a tutor, and speaking from my own experience, I have found that working-class single mothers may be conditioned into single motherhood, long before the biological act of giving birth. I have consistently found that my students who identify as or become working-class single mothers have experienced some form of early trauma, either their own or inherited from parents, in a family that is often toxic or is struggling to function… Significantly, this suggests that the parameters of single motherhood are not confined to the biological act of giving birth but instead pre-date it and, under patriarchal capitalism, can begin in childhood”.
While this speaks specifically to single motherhood, it also speaks of class. If there is a potential correlation between intergenerational experiences of family structures with trauma, capitalism and class, could this also be true about the age at which we have our children? Are ‘working-class’ m*thers, or those who originate from working class upbringings, more likely to have their children younger, by societal and family conditioning? In short, does it feel more ‘normal’ to have a child before 30 if you’re working class?
I don’t know how old the children of all the participants were, if they’d had their children in their teens, 20s, 30s or 40s and I don’t know how the participants would identify their class or what Office for National Statistic socio-economic classification would apply to them. But, if I can question whether working class conditioning predicts having children at a younger age, then I can in turn question whether the age of participants in the Radical Care project is an indicator of intergenerational capital (if not financial, than at least cultural).
It is a challenge to be a working artist (curator, producer, programmer, performer, artistic director etc. etc.). It is even more of a challenge when the systems are stacked against you.
I’m excited to see this work being done and these inequalities being researched and confronted and I think the Radical Care project did a brilliant job with the small budget it had. I hope that more money, time and resource is pumped into it so we can dig deeper and wider to unearth and tackle more of the systematic barriers which prop up gendered care.
References
CG Research. “Radical Care Evaluation.” Creative Scotland. Creative Scotland, March 1, 2024. https://www.creativescotland.com/resources-publications/research/archive/2024/radical-care.
Industria. “Structurally F-Cked.” Edited by Charlotte Warne Thomas. A-n. a-n The Artists Information Company, March 2023. https://www.a-n.co.uk/research/structurally-f-cked/.
“Scotland’s Population, the Registrar General’s Annual Review of Demographic Trends.” National Records of Scotland. National Records of Scotland, October 6, 2020. https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/files//statistics/rgar/2019/rgar-2019.pdf.
Image credit: Screenshot from Radical Care Sharing Event, Creative Scotland
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