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Visual Artists’ News Sheet | Special Issue: November – December 2024
Art Work
How Can I Prevent Burn-out as an Artist? Parasympathetic State
One Day Different
AOIBHEANN GREENAN OUTLINES KEY PRINCIPLES TO HELP CULTIVATE A MORE JOYFUL AND SUSTAINABLE PRACTICE.
FOR HER FIFTH COLUMN IN THE SERIES, LIAN BELL SHOWS HOW TAKING A GAP DAY CAN CHANGE THE WORLD.
THROUGH MY CONVERSATIONS with artists
FOR THE PAST year, I have used this VAN
and creative freelancers, I’ve observed that burnout is becoming an increasingly common experience. We face unique challenges, such as relentless pressure to innovate, meet client demands, and stay financially afloat in an unpredictable, competitive market. These factors often make burnout harder to recognise when we’re caught up in the daily grind. However, identifying the symptoms early is vital for safeguarding both your wellbeing and your creative spark. One of the most telling signs of burnout is persistent exhaustion – the kind that no amount of sleep seems to cure. You wake up feeling physically and emotionally drained, and fatigue follows you throughout the day. Another key indicator is emotional numbness or detachment from your work. What once was a source of enjoyment now feels burdensome. For artists, whose work thrives on emotional engagement, this disconnect can be especially debilitating. Preventing burnout requires a holistic approach that addresses both the external pressures of freelance life and the internal forces pushing you toward exhaustion. I’d like to offer four simple principles that can help you cultivate a more joyful and sustainable creative practice. 1. Prioritise Rest: It may seem annoyingly obvious, but prioritising rest is often one of the most difficult and counterintuitive commitments to uphold – especially when deadlines are looming! However, intentionally incorporating downtime into your schedule is essential for maintaining longterm creativity and mental health. Deep rest extends beyond simply getting enough sleep; it involves giving yourself the space to completely unplug. Regularly scheduling 15-minute breaks for activities like aimless walking, daydreaming, or meditation, enables your nervous system to shift from the overstimulated ‘fight-or-flight’ mode (sympathetic) into the parasympathetic state, where true recovery can take place. By nurturing a relaxed, receptive state, you create the ideal conditions for inspiration and creativity to naturally reemerge. We’ve all experienced how stepping away for brief intervals allows us to return to our work with fresh perspectives and discover new connections. In this way, rest becomes the foundation for every aspect of your creative practice. 2. Examine Your Motivations: Creative burnout often stems from deep-rooted psychological patterns, particularly the need for external validation. Unfortunately, this dynamic can lead to an unconscious cycle of perfectionism and overwork. It’s essential to routinely examine your underlying motivations. Practices like journaling, coaching, or therapy can guide you in asking important questions: Why am I pushing myself so hard? What am I trying to prove, and to whom? This self-awareness enables you to
shift your practice from one driven by external validation to one fuelled by authentic curiosity and personal fulfilment. As you detach your self-worth from achievement and validation, new creative avenues will often emerge – ones that a narrow focus may have previously obscured. 3. Embrace Play: Freelancers often face an intense focus on outcomes, which can stifle the joy and creativity that originally drew you to your craft. A powerful way to prevent burnout is to reconnect with playfulness in your process. Set aside time for unstructured experimentation, free from deadlines and the expectations of others. Ask yourself: What materials, colours, motifs, sounds, or phrases naturally excite me? What activities did I love as a child? Start collecting items and ideas that spark your interest, using a simple filter: Does this make me feel contracted or expansive? Follow the path of expansion and pay attention to how seemingly unrelated elements begin to connect in unexpected ways. As you let go of rigid expectations, you may experience surprising breakthroughs. Neuroscience supports this idea; dopamine, the brain’s ‘reward’ neurotransmitter, is triggered by curiosity and play, helping you enter more relaxed, open states conducive to problem-solving and creative flow. 4. Set Boundaries: Freelancing often blurs the lines between work and personal life that can lead to overwork and emotional exhaustion. Therefore, setting clear boundaries is essential for protecting your mental and physical wellbeing. This requires being intentional about the projects you take on and ensuring they align with your energy levels and personal values. One effective tool I use with my coaching clients is a scoring system based on non-negotiable criteria that each project must meet. This approach helps to ensure that you’re only taking on work that resonates with you, thereby avoiding misaligned projects that could lead to burnout. Additionally, it’s crucial to establish firm work hours – easier said than done – and make time for activities and relationships that nurture you outside of work. If you’re feeling burned out, view it as a signal that your creative practice needs to evolve. The phrase “work smarter, not harder” is especially relevant here. The key is to cultivate a practice that nurtures both your creativity and wellbeing. Remember, if you’re in this for the long haul, there’s no need to rush to the top. The quality of your work will always reflect the energy and intention behind it. By honouring your physical and emotional health, you set the stage for a more fulfilling and sustainable career. Aoibheann Greenan is an Irish artist founder of Rodeo Oracle, a coaching and mentoring service for artists. rodeooracle.com
column to unpick aspects of my interest in the labour of artmaking – from positioning walking as creative practice, or questioning the pace of how we work, to how coaching can strengthen artists’ agency, and the implications of travelling for work without flying. Pinpointing where this interest in artistic labour coalesced, it is probably with my experience of creating Gap Day. Ten years ago, Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray asked me to invent an artist support programme. At the time, a relevant funding scheme was offered through the Arts Council’s Theatre silo, so our focus was freelance theatre artists. I began thinking of what I needed myself as an overworked freelancer whose ‘day jobs’ were leeching energy from my artistic practice. Not much, I thought. Just a day in a room on my own to go through old notebooks, pick up half-forgotten threads of thought, and remember why I wanted to make art to begin with. My proposal was simple: pay artists for a day or two to do whatever it is they need to do and give them a room to do it in. With the input of Niamh O’Donnell (Mermaid’s then director, and a truly generous champion of artists) a plan formed. Remove the guilt of taking time ‘off ’ to be creative by paying people properly. Find a room in an arts centre, local to wherever they live, so that rural artists are as supported as urban ones. Ask the centre’s director to meet them for a cup of tea, facilitating local informal connections. Provide a packed lunch for nourishment and hospitality. A pilot project ran in 2015 and was an instant success. The application responses to that pilot shook me. Having previously been a reader for various open calls, I was habituated to the jazz-hands aspect of application-speak. I had written it many times myself. Look! I can do this! It’ll be great! I’ve done great stuff before! I can do it again! Gap Day applications were not that. The intentionally simple form asked why the artist needed a Gap Day, and the responses were painfully honest: Because I’m a full-time carer; I work multiple jobs; I’m a single parent; I have to wait until my housemates have gone to bed before I can use the kitchen table. It has become more common in recent years to hear about the working conditions of artists, but that was the first time I had seen it written so starkly. This was a narrative of people struggling against self-doubt, loneliness, overwork, and poverty. As the world changed, and as my own interests in artistic labour evolved, we added more resources for participants. Funding to cover additional needs, including childcare, so people can get the full benefit of their Gap Days. Online group gatherings. One to one coaching sessions. Trips to national conferences and networking events. A little money for each participant to pay an ‘Artist Friend’ for a few hours of inspiring conver-
sation. Most recently we added facilitated walks that take place around the country to meet, think, and talk together. But all of these are optional; the anchor point of Gap Day continues to be paid time (currently €240 a day) in a room to do whatever the artist needs to do. Even just one Gap Day can mean a lot: a sense of validation; a foot in the door of an arts organisation; respite from creative loneliness; or simply a bit of money. Each artist themselves chooses where they want to take their Gap Days and we arrange it for them. Organisations have also grown to value the programme as hosts; it can be an introduction to people they may not know, or a progression of an existing relationship. And for those organisations without much direct contact with the artmaking process, having an artist working in the building can be a buzz. However, Gap Day’s success is bittersweet. Its disproportionately positive impact is only due to the fact that artists are so under-served and under-appreciated. After ten years and having supported over 300 artists across the island, Gap Day has become a valued sticking plaster in what is a barely functioning system of subsidised theatre-making in Ireland. Though it offers a moment for artists to catch their breath and keep going, I sometimes fear we are giving false hope when the greater system may not prove able to support them. I can only trust that these small moments of respite may give artists the energy to confront these broken systems they have to work within. I value the work that looks like nothing. The walking, the staring into space, the conversations that meander. The imperative to take time in my own practice, to rest, and turn away from digital devices is something I am still learning to do. By creating structures for others to do so, through interventions such as Gap Day, I offer the permission for all of us to approach our work differently. Through Gap Day, hundreds of moments of respite and collegiality are woven together with the aim of forming a new way of working, and a new template for our collective artistic labour. Lian Bell is an artist and arts manager based in Dublin. lianbell.com