Over the summer, I have had to deal with the bureaucracy of a PIP application for my son.
I took part in Mansions Of The Future Summer School in an attempt to try to work out how to restart my career as an artist without being forced or coerced into “volunteering”. I don’t think it was very successful, as I haven’t yet received any offers of paid work, or funding to start a new project, and I felt as though I was being coerced back into old work that I abandoned as being exploitative a long time ago.
Thankfully, I finally received a letter from the council last weekend with a reduced council tax bill.
After the stress of the PIP application, we’re awaiting the outcome.
I have completed a short five week Carer’s Mental Health training course, so I can now use this training within my capacity as an artist.
It seems that the conclusion (from the Arts Council) is that proposals from artists in Lincoln are not good enough, or diverse enough, and as I know, graduates are leaving the city to seek work elsewhere.
So this means that the Arts Council think that the quality of work produced by University of Lincoln students / graduates is not good enough, and I don’t believe that, I believe that graduates here are not being given the knowledge and resources to make good funding applications to produce the work we want to, to the quality we want to. We are forced to compromise our work, and set up to fail.
As a carer, it’s hard to take time out of the constant form filling, bureaucracy, mind melting stress of the health and social care crisis, but one thing I have been fortunate to achieve is respite funding to visit family.
I normally don’t do any creative work when on a respite break, but it would’ve been silly to not go and see some work I’ve been aching to see for a while, and take the opportunity to explore the sculptural delights of Esbjerg!
So I visited Abba: Supertroupers and Adapt To Survive: Notes From The Future at the Hayward Gallery (not Lee Bul!), The Hive at Kew Gardens, and Mennesket bed Havet, in Esbjerg, Denmark.
All detailed in my blog.
This previous blog post outlines issues affecting artists working as carers for those with mental health conditions for #mentalhealthawarenessweek
Another good article by Sandi Toksvig.
I get criticised for writing a-n blog posts for free, so I know I’m being silenced and pushed out.
Another exploitative “opportunity” here.
I genuinely don’t know who I am now. I can’t produce any art, without funding, I feel like a fake doing a non-arts job to pay the bills, and in trying to find out how to give that up to focus more on my creative practice, bad advice given by volunteers at Citizen’s Advice Bureau was to “get another job”.
That was after yet another job application rejection and a couple of rejected funding proposals.
This caused my mental health to go into crisis mode. I have looked at The Samaritans. I don’t even think phoning them will be worth my time. All they do is listen. They can listen to the ringing of my phone with all the debt collection agencies harassing me for money the Arts Council refuse to award.
But nothing will be resolved.
I went for a respite break to visit family, which did give some relief.
But now I’m back to trying to work out how to get into arts therapy and avoid being coerced into more voluntary stuff while I still have some debts that need paying off.
Good news this week, as the Breathing Space campaign has been successful.
But it doesn’t go far enough to address and safeguard the fact that artists that are carers cannot realistically live off ever-decreasing welfare, Universal Credit delays, PIP application form filling, DWP ignorance and outright financial abuse, Grantium form filling, Grantium rejection after rejection, and maintain a working practice and manage a household as an artist with little or no income.
Carer’s UK are campaigning for Recovery Space – money and mental health. In this blog, for those that are always keen to support artists with mental health conditions, but not artists that care for them, this explains the difficulties we face, and why it’s impossible to practice working as an artist faced with such economic exclusion.
For International Women’s Day, I joined the strike. I think I’m on strike fatigue now. The art world carries on regardless, and seems to give no thought to artists that have been neglected to the point of all abandonment.
Sometimes, I think of vague ideas of ways to make work that requires minimum input, maximum return. Should I exhibit the smashed glass broken because I do 300% washing up? Should I pay a tenner to submit our failed PIP assessment for an Open exhibition?
City Arts emails me with an Open Call for their latest Institute Of Mental Health exhibition, but Portrait Of Ian Duncan Smith With Bandaged Nose still torments me in my studio, unsold, with mounting debts piling, and an unknown wait for the PIP review, my motivation to make something new with no funding is at absolute zero.
The CAB suggest we could make a new application for PIP. (whilst waiting for the DWP to reassess their failures). And to keep a daily diary. Do I look like Anne Frank??
No.
I’m being realistic here. I’m not dressing up caring as being all nice cups of tea and biscuits, because it isn’t.
Yes, I need time for myself, but that time is valuable. And it needs to be paid for, so for arts funding purposes, make sure you read the blog to understand the effect caring has on artists, and sign the letter to try to mitigate some of the impact.
