I was verging on unsurprised when I read, through Industria, that the average hourly rate paid to artists is £2.60. Out of a desire not to bum myself out, I have rarely sat down and calculated my fee against the hours put in. Though I’m often aware that the amount I’m paid will (or in some cases won’t even) cover the admin time alone. Alongside pay there is the reality that opportunities are rarely accessible. Even when accessibility is underlined as a primary concern of the organisation. Finding and sustaining work as an artist is challenging enough as it is. So much of our time is spent on the unpaid labour of writing artist grants and applications. In the past six months I’ve written countless applications. The two opportunities I have been offered haven’t worked out due to issues around access. One in particular changed the specifics advertised in their open call. Rather than taking place across a month, the gallery suggested a solo show, full events programme, install and deinstall should happen in one week. I had proposed a multimedia show that included two new films and a new series of paintings. The organisation stated “the current stage of development” as their reasoning. When I responded that this wouldn’t be accessible, and asked to return to the gallery’s original proposed timeline, the offer was taken away on the grounds of them being unable to meet my access needs.
The mentioned show is a body of work around the death of my dad when I was a child. It has seen many false starts including rejected funding applications and traumatic institutional experiences. I’ve since decided to leave the series dormant. Processing difficult personal histories through art (something that countless, predominantly marginalised artists engage with) is a particularly vulnerable space to encounter the often clinical approach of institutions. That show is one ghost in a cemetery of abandoned, half developed ideas which I’m unsure I will ever return to. Visiting that cemetery, I am met by the familiar sense of wanting to give up my practice. If I could figure out anything else I could do for work then I’d leave the arts altogether. Though with the prevalence of neurotypical workspaces, which are notoriously unfriendly to autistic workers, I’m unsure an alternative exists.
When I pitched this article, it was to write about avenues to making a living as an artist, independently of institutions. We were in the lead up to Christmas. Joni Mitchell’s River was on a loop (expressing my desire to skate away). I’d had those two opportunities fall through as a result of a failure to meet my access needs. Looking for a new form of revenue to soothe my dwindling bank balance, I made crafts for Christmas fairs. More than anything I wanted an escape route. A way to be less reliant on organisations that time and again failed to deliver what they set out to do: support artists. In the end, January rolled around. I experienced resurfacing autistic burnout which I’ve been living with for the best part of five years. As well as new physical symptoms resulting from being bed bound throughout that period.
Out of financial necessity (and an anxiety around money that likely stems from growing up without any) I decided to push through. I started to line my calendar with workshops and lectures, only to pull out when it became clear my health wasn’t improving. Since 2019 I have been signed off on unpaid sick leave repeatedly. Yet, I also haven’t ever really stopped working. The lingering awareness of my bank balance has kept me bound to at least some form of labour. Often this looks like shifting the forms of work I do. A continual negotiation of “too sick to stand in front of a room full of students and deliver a lecture” but “might just about manage to drag myself through sustaining an artist commission.”
Speaking has formed a key part of my job and livelihood for a long time. In recent months my health has forced me to take a step back and be quiet(er). Out of that silence, I’ve lost the capacity to articulate, and I’m not sure it will ever return in the same way. Just as I’m not sure the heavy tiredness will ever evaporate from my bones. Can it really be coming up to 10 years that I’ve been an art worker in some form or another? And in that time, haven’t I been walking down paths that lead to dead ends, only to change direction and meet the same impenetrable overgrowth? I’ve spent a solid amount of time thinking in rooms with other people, around how we change things, how we grow. I don’t feel any less isolated or more hopeful for having had those conversations. As an autistic person with limitations around energy and verbal communication, I’ve usually left dialogues with the familiar caress of burnout.
In the time of delaying the writing of this article, my intentions have changed again and again. I’d hoped to spend a period researching. Responding to people’s ideas about the challenges of finding hospitable workplaces as an autistic person. Finally delving into the breadth of Industria’s 2023 report. Perhaps it’s more honest to write to you from the depths of my burnout. Pulling thoughts out of my brain at 9pm on a Monday evening when it refuses to be quiet. Then again, if I was telling the truth, it would be to say I realised my bank balance could use a top-up. Better write something so I can send my invoice. And so the cycle continues.
Jamila Prowse is an artist and writer, propelled by curiosity and a desire to understand herself through making. Informed by her lived experience of disability, mixed race ancestry and the loss of her father at a young age; her work is research driven and indebted to Black feminist and crip scholars. She is an active participant in a rich and growing contemporary disabled artistic community and has been ongoingly researching, programming and creating around cripping the art world since 2018. Self taught, Jamila is drawn to experimenting with a multitude of mediums in order to process her grief and radical hope.
Viewing her practice as grief work, Jamila uses visual art making as a way to process complex family histories, loss, trauma and the isolation of being a bedbound, disabled, autistic person. Often incorporating oral histories into the conception of her works; the location of voice is vital in her explorations. She embeds creative access adjustments from the outset of each project – seeing access as a method of artistic articulation.
She is currently articulating through moving image, painting, photography, textiles and performance. Previous exhibitions and talks include TULCA Visual Arts Festival, (Galway Ireland), Ormston House Gallery, (Limerick, Ireland), Somerset House, South London Gallery, Studio Voltaire (London, UK) and Hordaland Kunstsenter (Bergen, Norway). Her writing has appeared in Frieze, Art Monthly, British Journal of Photography and elsewhere. She is currently working on her first novel.
This work has a