On career luck

Gabrielle Hoad | Lucky Catch (Dawlish Warren) | Digital photograph | 2023

 
I'm a firm believer in the idea that as an ordinary working artist, you must make your own luck: work hard, play fair, be generous to others, network regularly and never give up. But none of that sticks without a little extra glue. And that glue is credibility.

Credibility is something you can earn, but more often it is gifted: a friend or relative who's an art world insider, being taught by a well-connected art school lecturer, inherited ease with middle-class interactions. Talent is important, of course. But it's a myth that the best artists invariably rise to the top. Even for the best artists, it's credibility in the eyes of commissioners, curators and funders that makes the networking accumulate into opportunities, the hard work accrue into a reputable career.

Mainstream curators are rarely in the business of 'discovering' new talent - and if they are it's usually because they are pursuing a short-term inclusivity agenda. Otherwise, they tend to select artists that other people have already validated through a track-record of exhibitions, awards, recommendations and so on. 

Do I feel lucky? Well, I am a white European, which I realise confers considerable  privilege, but I am also female, older and from a background where a career in the arts was never considered a viable career option, hence being such a late starter. The question of credibility is rather tougher. On paper, my career as an artist is hardly glittering, but I've found - or more often, made - sufficient opportunities to create satisfying work, even if they haven't always had the level of funding or support they needed to really get off the ground. I am happy with my working life, if a little disappointed in the art world. 

Foxhole radio

Foxhole Radio (work in progress) | 2023

Following on from my work with Megan Calver at Durlston Country Park, a location that played a key role in the development of radio communications, I've become interested in making the simplest possible radio receiver. And this is it. No battery, no amplifier, no real tuner ... just some copper wire, a razor blade, a safety pin, a pencil lead and an earphone. (It also needs to be connected up to an aerial and an earth.)

Different versions of this receiver were built by soldiers during World War Two. Traditional radios could be traced by the enemy, so soldiers built crude radios (using blued or rusted razor blades as diodes), which were capable of receiving AM (amplitude modulated) transmissions. There are relatively few AM broadcasts these days, but it feels like some kind of magic even to hear static on it.

Edward Krasiński

Edward Krasiński | Spear | 1964

Returning to my own preoccupation with movement and the strange business of trying to represent it, I was delighted to discover this work by Edward Krasiński in Tate magazine. 

'Spears hung from the wires stretched between the trees created an illusion of movement. They were swishing [in the air]. It was all about preparing the spear to perform its function. Once prepared it could act on its own.’