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Visual Artists’ News Sheet | March – April 2024
Columns
Art Work
Art Work
On Capacity
Surface Tactics
CATHERINE HEMELRYK SHARES SOME THOUGHTS ON DELIVERING PROGRAMMES WITH LIMITED RESOURCES.
FOR THE FIRST IN A SERIES OF COLUMNS, LIAN BELL CONSIDERS THE IMPLICATIONS OF SLOW TRAVEL.
CAPACITY IS HOW much you can do with
I’M STANDING ON the platform of a Ger-
a set of resources. These resources include: people, money, materials, space, time, health, technology, environment, focus, and more. At CCA Derry~Londonderry, we aim to work smartly with what we have, to make the best programmes we can. Our resources include: a small but mighty team – one full time, three part-time; a small budget made up of restricted and unrestricted programme and core funding; gallery space / office / equipment; and an open approach to working. A list: We want to avoid: • Doing projects that don’t fulfil our mission just for the money. • Burning out staff. • Being miserable. • Exploiting artists or anyone we work with. • Being sloppy with the projects we make. Some approaches we take: • We know how much staffing our current funding covers and so we work in line with this capacity. • We work our contracted hours and build in staffing and artist fees to project funding. If there is no budget for this, we won’t do a project. We are realistic with our own expectations on what can be achieved within budgets. • We aim to work flexibly to accommodate the non-CCA work/life of parttime staff, and share managing the galleries. • We work as a team to build in time for our full-time member of staff to take TOIL (Time Off In Lieu) after intensive periods. • We are clear with artists and others at the start of projects about budgets, resources and timescales so everyone is on the same page. Whilst we cannot always control timescales set by funders, we can control what we apply for in the first place and find smart ways to work within limitations. Some thoughts on working contracted hours: • It is very tempting to work more than our contracted hours. • If we work more hours than we are paid for, we are contributing to the shadow economy that perpetuates low pay as the real primary resource of a project, hiding the real cost and resources. • A personal note: I get ill if I overwork. I have a compromised immune system, so have to be careful; however, no one should overwork, immune system shenanigans or not. • We keep a TOIL log and plan PAL (Paid Annual Leave) in advance, to make sure that the gallery staffing is covered, and workloads managed, so we can enjoy our time off. • Feeling guilty for taking time off is not
helpful. Feeling guilty for all the things we could be doing but aren’t, because there is no capacity, is not helpful. • Underestimating how much resource something will take is easy to do. • Not having work emails on personal phones helps with work/life balance. • If something has a deadline, we flexi. But if that happens all the time, then we have a problem and need to do address why this is and make changes, so that it doesn’t happen continually. • Some things are easy and fast; some things have to wait, whilst other urgent matters are tended to; and some things are really difficult and can’t be rushed. Feeling guilty for being slow isn’t helpful. • We don’t always get this right; external factors will throw all sorts of curve balls, but we do our best and continually strive to do better. Practical steps organisations can take: • Do learn your organisation’s capacity and don’t over-promise what you can deliver. • Don’t work more than your contracted hours. If everyone works extra, it contributes to sustained underinvestment in the arts and burnout. • Do budget for paying artists and freelancers for their time. • Don’t substitute staff with volunteers. Where you do work with volunteers, factor in training and volunteer management. • Do keep a TOIL log. If you are continually going over hours, then you need to either: Increase the staffing and secure funding to pay for staff time.. • Don’t forget to budget for staff time for reporting, research, and fundraising. • Do your best to ensure work stacks allow staff to take TOIL. • Do respect staff time off. • Do create open lines of communication and structures so that anyone can ask for help if they are struggling; change can only happen if problems are known. • Do ask if the project is right for your organisation: Is it in line with your mission? Can it function within your budget / timescale / resources? If no, can you increase any of these? And if still no, this really is not the right project for your organisation. • Don’t be a perfectionist; life is too short. • Do keep perspective. • Above all, whether you are an organisation or an individual, be kind and remember that health is the most important thing. Catherine Hemelryk is the Director of CCA Derry~Londonderry. •
ccadld.org
man railway station. There are two bags at my feet: a pink day pack, with such valuables as my laptop, passport, wallet, and chargers; and a larger blue backpack, filled mostly with dirty clothes. I realise I should probably have my valuables in the less easy to steal bag. When moving, I wear the blue backpack on my back, and my pink backpack on my front, usually hanging from one shoulder. I feel strong, and I can walk quickly and quietly. I’m happy not to be adding to the din of suitcase wheels pinging off pavements, off cobbles, off tiles: tactactactactactac. I’m travelling with an Interrail ticket as an experiment. I want to research how feasible it is to take fewer flights, while continuing (and expanding) my professional relationship with mainland Europe. As an artist and arts manager based on the island of Ireland, I’ve flown a lot for work over the years. I’m doing this research as an ethical experiment, but not just one to do with the pollution of aviation fuel. This journey is also about the ethics of deliberately going slower in an industry that increasingly values speed and productivity. I want to see what it does to my thinking, practice, experiences, and to my connections with other humans. One morning, having boarded like a zombie at the crack of dawn, I sit in the nearly empty restaurant carriage drinking strong coffee and eating bread and jam while looking out at the morning sun on the beautiful Czech-German border, with a winding river, and green wooded hills, and a castle on a cliff. It is a perfect Interrail snapshot moment, with all the administration, awkwardness, confusion, sore muscles, perimenopause, dirty clothes, messiness, flatlands, self-doubt, grumpiness, and boredom not in the picture. I try to find ways of advocating for slowing down and taking more time, particularly to people who work in arts organisations. To resist pressure from funders to forever do more with less. To reimagine ‘value for investment’. Yet here I am, thanks to a grant from one of those funders. To do this research, I’ve been given an Agility Award from the Arts Council. I design two threeweek periods of travel, knitting together some European work, attending festivals and exhibitions, online work from Ireland, and a networking event. Throughout my travels, I send postcards to the Arts Council to thank them for their support and tell them what I’m up to. I imagine them giving one or two administrators a few moments of respite to remember what all the emails, spreadsheets and meetings are for, and what they mean to the people they are supporting. I have a lot of sympathy for the people working there, and other big arts institutions in Ireland. The systems they have to operate within
are extraordinarily badly designed, patched together with the kind of work practices that often lead to burnout. I find support for my journeys in other ways too. I’ve asked some organisations employing me over the summer to spend a bit more on my travel, I’ve organised a house swap in Brussels, I’ve asked people I know in various cities to sleep on their sofas, and I’ve tried to add activities to each leg, to get the most out of it all. When I come across other artists and arts workers who are also travelling long distances overland, I ask them to tell me about their experiences. Pippa Bailey is maintaining a European work life while based in Australia: “This time I travelled 6800km by rail and road to save a tonne of carbon. This is not a gimmick, it’s an ethical stance.” She and I cross paths at the Prague Quadrennial, where we have a beer in the June sun. Pippa says: “I was deliberately rehearsing a future that I think is needed. I am tired of working in broken systems. I can imagine different ways of managing time and resources and understand how to hold the creative processes needed to allow new systems to flourish. However, the world of work I am in is desperately hanging onto old ways, almost aggressively defending them. Travelling slowly helped me have perspective on this, finding strength to go back in for another round of discussion. It also offers concrete examples of change and has provided more ideas about how to do better.” I’ve noticed when I talk to people about this, they don’t believe they have the power to slow their work down. I can see they think I’m being naïve. I think many of us have more power than we give ourselves credit for. The more of us that can demonstrate the value of this way of working, the easier it will be to articulate it to organisations, and the more likely they will support us to do it. Right? And we can also advocate for the people running the organisations to slow down themselves and give their staff time to work at a more humane pace. Doing less, but better. Imagine. Lian Bell is an artist and arts manager based in Dublin. This column is an extract from Lian’s longer essay, Surface Tactics, first published on her website in October 2023. lianbell.com