‘Averaging’: Acknowledging Living-With Practices

Sean Roy Parker, one of our 2024 Fellowship recipients, shares an extract from a long text he has been developing which draws similarities between artworkers and landworkers in the context of how their labour is mistaken and undervalued, how they are co-categorised by HMRC, and urgent collective calls for trialling Basic Income.

I have been a self-employed artist for eight years, using my practice as the main mode for both income generation and creative expression, which, in a culture that ties success and productivity to a person’s worth, can cause one to lose grip on their sense of reality. For me, it has often manifested as an inability to make or keep healthy boundaries around where work ends and leisure begins. Often, it has manifested as taking poorly paid work that is at best unfulfilling and at worst self-exploitative.

The constraints of my position as a precarious worker (which of course is a chosen lifestyle that I am privileged to have and could leave at any point) without generational wealth or labour benefits like holiday pay, sick pay, HR etc, means it’s rare that I can find employment or projects that are simultaneously financially generous, local to me, and thematically suitable. Thus I regularly have to consider whether my chosen path, in the matter that I am most creatively called and professionally experienced to do, is capable of supporting me to live a life in alignment with my values — ecological responsibility, anti-racism, self-education, interpersonal connection, degrowth economics, class consciousness, free expression — without the looming threat of bankruptcy or self-exploitation.

The times I have managed to attend to these non-negotiables within my projects, the fight for them has often cost me my mental health, social time or appropriate wage. It’s also possible I may have unknowingly lost potential future/regular employment because of the compulsion to prioritise integrity and demand accountability over staying silent when faced with poor treatment. I’m not as easy to manipulate as I once was.

Ultimately, being an artist is my most valuable tool for staying sane in an insane world. Having swapped London for rural Derbyshire in 2021, I made a commitment to live with my practice - to embrace amateurism and prioritise creative thinking in community with others. This vision generates spaciousness to follow all my interests with the same intensity and sincerity and for outcomes to arise without force.

At the time of applying for this fellowship, I had already had several interactions with Axis over a number of years; having a membership that connects me with artists across the UK;  a micro-residency with collaborator Jamie Hudson in a shopping centre in Newark-on-Trent; being invited to present my work online (twice). In short, I’m familiar with Axis and the lengths they go to to functionally support artists and have luckily benefited directly from this multifaceted approach. When making the application, I researched the previous recipients and took courage from their respective practices, realising I could sow a seed of an idea I had been thinking about and be given the support to germinate it.

Since much of my day-to-day creative practice revolves around food—foraging, landwork, cooking, fermentation and herbal medicine—I spend most of my creative time outside or in the kitchen. The only times I am really sitting down is to shore up my admin, or write digestive passages like this one. A year-round observational endeavour of plants and worms does not require a traditional studio set-up, and I have gradually stopped making physical artworks that cannot be eaten, composted or recycled. The only thing I really want to make in the climate crisis is living soil.

The prevalent framework that holds my work together is one of materials research—noticing how organic lifecycles and entropy affect the recognisable properties of materials through transformational processes, like turning abundant fruits into leather, invasives into paper, bark into dye. To demonstrate systems thinking, I need to work with both the micro and macro, I need more time and money to work in my specialist interest, and find willing collaborators who have land or surplus that needs attention! 

One challenge I’ve repeatedly come up against in having an interdisciplinary practice is the lack of critical feedback in the more mainstream forums, likely due to a blend of my position on the periphery of institutes, and my choice of alternative materials and methodologies. It would, of course, be easier to get crit on sculptures or paintings than on artisanal vinegar or an eco-dyeing workshop, but these are integral parts of my wider questioning of ecological engagement. Is the unwillingness to expand our ideas of what constitutes an art material restricting us from thinking imaginatively about how to change course in this crisis?

Receiving the Axis Fellowship gave me access to meeting with other professional artists in a regular, non-judgemental and constructive environment, where critical feedback is both welcomed and treasured. This kind of focussed discourse is rare for artists beyond (or outside of) academia, although I was fortunate to have been baptised into anarchic art family School Of The Damned in 2017, where we routinely and cheerily shredded each other in crits during the lead-up to exhibitions and performances. A few artist-led studios I know also run crit sessions, however this is far from the norm.

Critical friendships have blossomed from the Axis Fellowship, similar to those I found in SOTD that are still going strong. Having my eyes opened to different ways of working, the insides of artists’ minds (and studios), and common struggles that practitioners face, I can better relate to the convoluted routes that individuals take to realise their visions, plus the organisation and determination it takes to maintain such a precarious balance once they find it. I saw this as an opportunity to lean away from resource-draining Lead Artist commissions that I had become accidentally wedded to, and towards integrated ecological consultancy that nourishes me reciprocally.

During the six-months of support and soundboarding from the other Fellows, I was able to pilot a permaculture-influenced land management scheme for a friend who runs a B&B for walkers near Hadrian’s Wall, develop a practical recipe for community composting for a rural arts institute, and framework technical documents that will make me less vulnerable as a freelancer. Artists are not only remarkably honest people, they are deadly problem-solvers under pressure.