Back To School
Learning the lessons art school missed

Now in it's 5th year, Back to School with Axis is our annual season of free events on the practical business of being an artist: the things art school did not teach you, or taught on the day you were not there.

Free, Online with Q&As.

We aim to answer some of your questions about life as an artist, with a little help from our friends: practitioners, curators and writers who know what the work is actually like and are happy to say so. 

This year we have two curators explaining how they find artists, two writers on what it takes to keep going, a workshop on money, and a roundtable on working with scientists.

What Curators Want

Emalee Beddoes and Matthew Pendergast

7 pm (BST / UK time)

Two curators, one in a regional museum service and one in a Manchester gallery with a national programme, on what they look for, how they come across artists in the first place, and what makes a working relationship one they want to repeat.

Register

Book Club: How to Enter the Art World

Hettie Judah

7 pm (BST / UK time)

After a late start, a first career, illness, raising children, a crisis of confidence, or leaving it in disgust. Hettie Judah on the years people take out, the reasons they take them, and what success means once you stop measuring it against somebody else's timeline.

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Show Me the Money

Samra Mayanja

7 pm (BST / UK time)

Money is the thing artists are least often taught to handle and most often kept awake by. A practical and reflective workshop on what you charge, how you talk about it, and what your own attitude to it is quietly doing to your practice.

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Book Club: Survival Notes

Lydia Figes

7 pm (BST / UK time)

For her book Survival Notes, Lydia Figes asked contemporary artists how they actually keep going and wrote down what they said. Unusually direct about money, rejection, timing, and the parts of professional life nobody explains in advance.

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Crossing the Art-Science Divide

Karina Thompson and Diana Scarborough, with Edwin Colyer

7 pm (BST / UK time)

Artists and scientists have a long history of working together. Karina Thompson and Diana Scarborough both work with researchers across medicine, engineering and ecology, and this roundtable is about the mechanics: how these collaborations start, what each side wants, and what happens when the two ways of working come together.

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Every event is free and open to anyone, member or not. Axis is a charity funded by its members, and that is what pays for this: no sponsorship, no public funding, no ticket sales.

Recordings go into the Axis Community afterwards, where Axis members can watch them again, along with everything from previous years.

Join Axis

Five years of this now. Previous seasons have covered artist writing, budgeting and funding, PhD pathways, MFA study, photographing your own work, and regenerative practice.

Access to previous talks available in the Member Only Community.