work n stuff

[1nnit]

I was in a sandpit the other day with a bunch of women. One was a singer, one a musician, one was a DJ, another a film producer and the last a designer. All had significant careers and were professionals in these roles. You would have heard of their stuff. All had moved to where we live due to having kids and needing space/a better life balance etc- it is a town where property is cheap but resources are poor. All have tried to find interesting work/set stuff up and have not succeeded. What is this about? Is it a feminist issue? Is this what is happening to other female creatives who leave London or other cities? Such huge skills and resources lying idol when the will/need to work (but without commuting) is there. It seems like such a frustrating waste to me. I don't really have a question but would appreciate any reflections.

I agree with Eveesmummy and 1nnit about the lack of cultural influence, and everyone who cited financial reasons. The local development agencies are probably more likely to give funding and venue space to local people (especially young ones in the hope of uncovering a breakout star designer or whatever rather than funding modestly successful people to keep quietly chugging along at a local level). They might also be more likely to give the creative teaching jobs to locals. Also, I think the population size has a lot to do with it. You could approach dozens of people in London with your idea and if a couple say yes, that's enough to keep you in constant work. But if there are only a couple of people in the sticks to approach, and they both say no, you are stuffed.
Who runs the local arts festival?
Is there a local arts collective that the designer could join?
What films have already been made in the local area and who produced those?

are we not local people if we live here? why would creative teaching jobs go to locals? (if by that you mean people who were born here?) thats discrimination isn't it? how could that even work?

Utilising creative people creates work- that is what I don't understand. it stimulates the economy and gets exciting things happening.

You see it in London all the time. the artists move in coz its cheap, start working and making things happen and get priced out the area. then they move on to where its cheap and the cycle repeats. In a way, that is what has happened here but there is something that is stopping the work from getting going.

I still dont know what I am really asking. Maybe its "why are so many mothers underemployed?" maybe its "why do the regions not value creative practices as important economic stimulators in areas of deprivation?" or maybe its also that quite a lot of creative work involves staring at walls and you cant get the time (or you cant justify the time) to stare at walls when kids are around and child care is so expensive.

or maybe Im just rattling on about nothing.

yes Chunderella that it part of my disquiet.

Hmm, but in London there are art buyers and dealers and galleries and colleges - because there is a sufficiently high concentration of people for that to be economic.

That said, St Ives is an artistic hub that grew organically to start with and was then helped with the Tate gallery etc - but if course the town had wealthy tourists as well.

What else is happening in your area that creatives could link to?

there are a few festivals and bits and bobs. small pockets of high quality stuff. lots of low quality stuff. Most of the people I have met here whose work is any good (men or women) don't make work, show work or teach here. Maybe thats part of the problem- its much harder to commute when you have preschoolers.

I guess maybe we all just underestimated the impact that having children would have on our abilities to keep working in our respective fields.

ie if you have to work hours outside of conventional childcare support or to a point where you will never see your kids- you stop working. once you stop working you take over the domestic shiz and you leave the city to find somewhere cheaper. Once you are out of the city, you become underemployed in your profession unless you live somewhere with good networks and agencies like the one Buffy linked to. Once you become underemployed, it gets harder to make a convincing argument to your partner/anyone else that you need unpaid studio time to try out ideas. So you stop and end up hanging out in sandpits.

I guess the reason why i was wondering if it was a feminist issue is that I haven't met any men in the same position.

Yes to all of the above!

But it would be possible for the men and women to divide the commute from the outset. That they often don't is a feminist issue.

or perhaps also that if the staring at walls bit was required by my husband- he would just take the time and do it. His needs would be met like that. I think all of us are struggling with the confidence to demand that time for our work and because there is no local formal support for artists/musicians etc. it is just a question of trying to justify taking that time to one's partner. We are definitely all struggling with that.

Yes, that's true. But it could be structured - DH takes the children out for several hours at the weekend, or DW goes to a quiet place if more suitable?

yes i guess so. I know various people have tried different things and almost all have not worked.

we are talking about a few different things now too- I guess when I started thinking about this stuff i was feeling frustrated that we are underemployed when we have between us a huge and valuable skill set.

Real professional skills- studio work, editing, arranging etc. also experience of industries, touring, networks etc. etc. these things are valuable on their own.

Making work- as in the creative stuff- is a bit different. that's the stuff we went on to talk about - the staring at the wall arty bits. I guess the problem with that side of it is that I cant do anything in a few hours- I need a year of solid studio time, at least a couple of days a week, no interruptions, total immersion in the work to make anything that is any good.

I know that is a luxury so Im not complaining that no one will give me that- its just, i don't know, an impossible dream now. i do have friends that have this time here but they are all men or child free.

I do know one woman who has achieved incredible things by carving out this kind of time for herself, but i also know how hard she had to fight to get the space and how guilty and worried about it she felt sometimes.

I guess that old saying that "there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall" was probably onto something.

i seem to have got a bit maudlin and whiney sorry.

Yes re pram in the hall.

Whatever your childcare solutions, having children imposes boundaries on time, space, energy and focus. As a class, women are more likely to have those boundaries delegated upon them because it has ever been thus. Even a 50:50 split of childcare etc probably curtails some creativity if the kind you mean because there are still limits.

We need a grant to build Time Turners!

amen to that.

creativefinancenetwork.co.uk/

Info on sources of finance and business support for creative industries.

www.creativeunited.org.uk/

Occupations with irregular hours/income, strong competition for work, self employment or short term contracts are trickier to do after DC. Some creative industries have a high proportion of these things.

Living a commute away from large cities is probably another factor. I'm in a different field, and relatively near London, but local employment (full time, 9-5) isn't great in terms of pay or range of opportunities, so I commute.

And as you say with small DC it is hard to get time for anything!

I suppose if you have children, then the need for "money, and a room of one's own" becomes even more important for the wall staring time. And mentally harder to "carve out" the time if you're not surrounded by other creative types (your own Bloomsbury Group?) and feel that you are the only one trying to do it.

I think a lot of female professional talent goes to waste _ whether creative or otherwise - when women have children. It's a hard reality to accept and even harder to change.

On the other hand, people in creative industries always have a harder time jobwise than other more practical, down to earth sectors e.g. accountancy or engineering.

The fact that these women live in a small town makes the situation worse as there aren't as many opportunities as in big cities.

So those three factors put together explain why talented, intelligent, educated women find themselves in this day and age at a great loss in terms of income and career development.

That's one more knock back from a local organisation today so I am taking on a pretty much identical project in the city with the commuting and all that that entails. I just don't understand it- I fundraise for everything I do so it costs the local organisation nothing and they gain so much. There is so much resistance here. I accept that its probably not overtly a feminist issue but it is depressing and baffling none the less.

and that project would have employed two of the sandpit women, part time on school friendly hours, doing what they are professionally trained to do.

What was the project? Might help in understanding the difficulties if we knew at least roughly you are looking to do.

It may be that the organisation you approached have tried something similar in the past and found it to be unsuccessful and therefore they don't want to try it again.

Could it also be that the creative arena where you live is "full" and there is simply no room/requirement for more?

I live in a small town and during the summer holidays there were 8 new children in DD's nursery class. All of them with parents who had moved out of London to enjoy what they saw as a better quality of life. However they are now finding the reality is a bit different from what they envisaged. Our town is dominated by one sport/leisure industry. It has come as a complete shock to them that the majority of work is in this industry and that the salaries are too low for them to even contemplate applying for it (the salaries are actually good, just not capital city sized salaries). And, no, there aren't as many jobs as there are in London, we are a small town.

There is also a large creative arena within the town, but these women do not want to participate in it. They are only interested if someone/an organisation takes up their idea, and allows them complete freedom to do things THEIR way - as they see themselves as "better" at whatever it is than anyone else as they are from London and therefore MUST be more experienced. And they are only interested in limited times as they ALL go back to London on Friday morning to escape the boredom of living here where they feel there is nothing to do, nowhere decent to eat, and the social life is crap. And, it doesn't help that they are continually moaning about how crap life and the town is to people who have lived here all their lives.

Now, I know these are the women I know, and they are possibly quite different from those you are talking about, but they really do not help themselves in the slightest.