About 8 months ago I started seriously looking into obtaining a dedicated studio space again. I had visited the very fine set up of a colleague and had pangs for a space of my own again.
The visited studio wasn’t vast but it was clean and well equipped, in an excellent facility and well out of my price range. Much like privately renting a home, even studios billed as affordable are usually very far away from that, and anything well-appointed is certainly approaching what a domestic rental would be. Despite this, I started contemplating a much smaller unit in the less salubrious neighbouring complex. This vastly expensive and inflexible rental tenancy is problem one with even the notion of having a studio as an artist.
The next problem was maybe more of a psychological one driven by inner conversations about the value of my job. I do actually earn all my money from creative industry pursuits or arts lecturing. In truth, a studio still felt like a luxury. I didn’t feel that I should pay out on another big monthly commitment including rent, insurance, electricity keys and all to have to drive across a sprawling suburban London borough to use the thing.
Studios in the UK in 2023 aren’t just a bit expensive, but they are so expensive they feel like a luxury even to those of us with professional profiles, and they are so few and far between that on top of their expense you would be lucky to find one that is actually local to you.
Another problem was some intrinsic but ridiculous sense of shame that was wrapped up in all of this. For so many years I prided myself on being the sort of artist who didn’t need a studio, or the trappings of prestige surroundings that we’d been introduced to when I first studied an art and design BTEC and was streamed into the Fine Art path.
Probably some of this ambivalence was always financial. As I originally left college with the BTEC to work before more studying, I had been used to working in lower paid and flexible day jobs so I could build my portfolio up with sporadic art department contracts. Nothing was as expensive as it seems to be now, and pay was proportionally higher, but renting a whole space for myself before I was established would have seemed egotistical and even more financially reckless than usual. I slowly built up some character illustration work, which also morphed into makeup, character design and prosthetics, while working at home on the kitchen table.
By the time I went back to study I’d secured some really decent production jobs but renting a whole space was still a luxury when I had access to a very serviceable spare room and kitchen table. I was still in my 20s and used to having latex hands and heads hanging around the house. However, there were other things at play. I never felt like a legitimate artist / designer because both financially and in spirit, those expensive tenancies only seemed accessible to artists who were regularly exhibiting and selling in swanky galleries or who had some other means to swan around carving giant waxworks in between trips to Tuscany.
My part-time BA didn’t have studio space for the first two years, and I was working a lot more digitally again at that point, so I started working on the bus, which also gave me the time I craved away from the institution. This really formed my own new working practice, as maybe a university course that provided a permanent studio space might form another person’s practice. If my course had studios would I have been built up to be a real confident studio artist only to be beaten down by life upon graduation when I wouldn’t be able to access that studio again, or would it have given me entitlement to feel an artist’s studio was my right even without Tuscany, a kaftan or a bald head?
I still love to go and think, write and draw on public transport and it is very much in my own studio mix as a place. As studying was only part time, I was still firmly on the kitchen table for prosthetics work. I scared my cat with a severed head and nearly broke up a relationship by spilling red wax on a very important pair of shoes but otherwise this all seemed more normal than walking into a rented studio would. Is this studio dynamic something we should talk about at art school? Is one way better, or are there seasons for things? Should being in a studio be a right of passage, or is this an outmoded way of approaching an art environment?
Other than that I always had spare rooms as I got older. My only actual foray into renting a studio space led to being a bit ripped off because I signed my year’s contract three months before the whole long-established studio decided to close down due to relationship problems between the owners. I got my deposit back but the three months rent and electricity was spent on moving in, a brief holiday and then moving out.
What really changed it all and got me thinking about separate art spaces again was the pandemic. Losing the majority of your work, and the roof over your head among income and mortgage offer collapses isn’t a unique pandemic story, and neither was it that bad for me because I had one job left and a supportive family and then it did all bounce back after 18 months or so. However, I was left without the vast spare room I’d been using as both studio and office and although adapting to the corner of tables again was really fine, I did slowly feel I needed more space.
Probably one of the saddest pandemic art things that happened to me was the closure of my beloved open access print studio. Open access studios were also something I came to rely on after studying, and being a printer this was something I felt spoiled for choice with once upon a time. Open access technical studios are brilliant because they give you all the expensive heavy duty equipment and they also give you the community that is one thing home-studios miss. Yet thankfully monthly rent and tenancy contracts are not part of this arrangement. For some reason they always felt accessible to me as well. If you could use the equipment cleanly and professionally enough to pass an induction then you had the right to join up. I was too sad to join another print studio after they closed, so maybe this also led to my looking for more of my own space. It goes without saying that I don’t think there are enough open access studios in the UK in 2023, which has a lot to do with a lack of sustainable arts funding.
By the time I started costing a rented studio out, I realised that building my own space might well be what I needed to do instead of feeling trapped with a choice between a tenancy commitment I didn’t want or making postage-stamp sized work on the corner of a table. A reasonable bank loan for a small studio build would cost less than a monthly rent payment and at least it would come to an end after 3 or 4 years. I would also have choice about bills for electricity, insurance etc. It fitted in with the love of innovation that originally got me working on the bus, but more importantly it would be a way to commit to what I have been doing for nearly 30 years by actually claiming some of my own space for it.
Part 2: The Building…
(photo credit – Columbian Press at Richmond Art School)
