It is Friday afternoon and I am wondering where the week went. It must be is a sign that I’m busy …
Two weeks ago I wrote an email stepping down as project coordinator for Sandcastles in Greece. This week I submitted a modest invoice for a few hours of the time I spent working with it. The lessons I have to remember are to trust my instincts and to accept that I work best in a well-structured context. Some of the artists involved have discussed picking up the project when everyone has more time; it is something I am certainly interested in. I am still a little concerned about how the project will be presented in the research of the artist who initiated the whole process but that is out of my hands.
Meeting the other artists was very good and encouraged me to make an application to KKH (Stockholm’s Royal College) for their Project program. It is a great opportunity to realise a project with the support of a very well resourced institution, for me it would also be a very good introduction to my new Swedish peer group. I met a few of them, and saw evidence of a lot of them, at the art fairs here in Stockholm.
In return for helping with language editing I received a free pass to the Supermarket fair, and of course a copy of the catalogue/ magazine. It was very satisfying to see my name in print along with all the other volunteers who enable Supermarket to keep going and expanding. This year the fair looked even more slick, with even more space (it took over an additional gallery in Kulturhus so now it totally covers one and half floors of this impressive building,) the stands were bigger and the galleries airier (to everyone’s relief I’m sure). It has been noticeable to me that over the four years that I have attended the fair the number of truly radical looking stands has significantly decreased. There are far too many possible reasons for this for me to guess why this might be the case (everything from less funding for artist run organisations to the fair not serving a purpose for radical outsiders). It was interesting to consider how I might benefit from attending as an individual artist beyond (the ever useful) ‘seeing what’s out there’. I realised that I am not really in a position to get involved with an ‘artist run organisation’ though it is very re-assuring to know that there are so many continuing to do well in northern Europe and that there are connections with the rest of the world.
I had an interesting conversation with a man from Nest in The Hague. After visiting London he was very impressed with how artists there managed to hold down multiple low paid jobs, live in an expensive city and produce similar quality and quantity of work to those living in other European cities with support from national and local arts funding. Referring to my own experience (and that of London colleagues) I spoke about the fragility of such an existence, how the loss of a regular part-time teaching can be disastrous, how competition between artists keeps down fees for community and education work and how few artists (relative to the number who graduate each year) are able to pursue their professional careers for their ‘working life’. A few days after that conversation I realised that perhaps the quality and quantity of work produced was a red herring. What I see here, in Sweden at least, is that the quality and quantity of life as an artist is far greater. Basically it is a far more sustainable profession. Many of the ‘young’ artists that I meet here have families (I mean partners and children), many take an annual holiday and most have their own apartments. These are not ‘celebrity’ artists, just regular working artists. While working in a bar, supermarket or institution in addition to working the studio might lend the artwork social relevance it can equally prevent one from having a rich and fulfilling life outside out the studio.
(Photographs to follow)
