How Axis's independence puts artists first

Being an artist is tough. It is hard to sustain a practice. 

This is not new, it has been described repeatedly, in reports, in research, and in artists’ own words. Income is unstable, time is fragile, support is uneven, and artists are often expected to build their own systems of support just to keep going. More than a decade ago, research we commissioned, Validation Beyond the Gallery, described a landscape where support was fragmented, recognition was inconsistent, and responsibility sat largely with the artist.

Artists still recognise it immediately. As Lucy Wright writes, 

“Painful scarcity of funding and opportunities means that we are all in a Hunger Games-type competition, whether we like it or not, and that doesn’t feel very much like care.”

We do not lack understanding of the problem. In nearly thirty years working in the arts, I have seen the same issues surface again and again. The pattern is familiar. A report is published. The findings are clear. The recommendations are sound. Calls for change follow. But in practice, the structure holds. Funding remains complex. Too much resource sits in systems rather than reaching artists, and meaningful support is still hard to access.

Recognition is not the same as structural change.

In 2013–14, Axis lost its Arts Council funding. When I became Executive Director in early 2015, we were within twelve months of closing. The obvious question was how to get the funding back. I chose not to start there, because returning to the same system on the same terms would reproduce the same result. Instead, we asked a different question. What might happen if we stopped trying to fit that system, chose independence and put artists first?

Before then, very little of our public funding was reaching artists directly. Most of it supported staff, infrastructure, and delivery. That is how public funding largely operates: it funds systems and structures that then rely on artists to carry the cost. This shapes how organisations behave. You align with funding criteria, respond to policy shifts, or follow commercial logic. Important work happens within those systems, but they do not start with what artists need in order to keep going.

The consequence is clear. The burden shifts back onto the artist, through unpaid labour, unclear expectations, or limited access to support. Our independence allowed us to change that by altering how support works in practice and moving resources closer to artists. It also allows us to work differently, not moving from one funding cycle to the next, but building something that can hold over time.

Today, without public funding, we are putting around £70,000 directly into artists’ hands each year. 

We have built a growing community of artists who support each other, share knowledge, and sustain their practice over time. Six out of seven of our team are practising artists. Over the last ten years, whenever we have asked artists to work with us, we have paid them. We operate a network of ‘meanwhile spaces’ on high streets across the country with real commercial value and do not charge artists to use them. Where value exists, artists should benefit from it.

That shift came from one principle; care. Care for artists’ time. Care for the reality of sustaining a practice. Care for the conditions that make work possible. Care for what happens over time, not just what can be announced now. Care is not soft. It is practical. It shapes where resources go and what is prioritised. It is shaped, in part, by my own experience growing up working class in the north, where support is often something you build together because it is not there by default.

We cannot fix everything, but we can decide what we do with what we have, and who it is for. If this can be done at our scale, then more of the system can reach artists directly. 

We choose to put artists first. Independence makes that possible.