Pea Arts About

A topic that is frequently on my mind because it figures behind the scenes in much of the artwork I analyse is art labour, particularly when that labour is invisible. For the past few months I've experienced first-hand what it is to make things for someone else's name as author or artist to be attached to it. These projects have all gone towards upcoming events celebrating the life and work of my dear friend Sally Madge . As I've written about before , this includes completing some of her in-progress work, and more recently, doing some mending and adapting to one of her performance props for another artist to use in tribute to her. Messy adaptation for a performance prop. It is not work I ever envisaged myself doing, least not because I do not think of myself as an artist, and, I find, neither do most other people. Sally and our friend Alastair MacLennan would have something to say about that, but there we are. Partly spurred on by learning languages in which you do not per...

Given the machinations of social media, the ways many of us attribute value have become contingent on how many likes, shares, comments and plays a piece of content gets. My outputs attract relatively few of these. While I appreciate those few engagements immensely and am humbled that anyone is watching/reading/listening at all, I often have to catch myself on when I get annoyed that my hard work isn't reaching more. That's when I have to question my motivations for making work and putting it out there at all. What it ultimately comes down to is a feeling that my chance to deliver top-class arts & humanities education and research was taken away from me, and - realistically - I was in a toxic profession (academia) that is unrecognizable from external perceptions of it anyway. The ideal so many of us had going in and were rarely, if ever, corrected about, simply doesn't exist. And I didn't want all those years of graft, training and knowledge to go to waste. I was jus...