Why I Chose to Rent an Art Studio Before My Art Made Any Money

How choosing to rent an art studio gave me the space to become an artist — and Villains the space to grow.

At the beginning of this year, I made a decision: by the end of it, I wanted to be able to call myself an artist.

Which is slightly ridiculous, because I've been making things for as long as I can remember. But in my head, being an artist meant something different. It meant this was what I did. Not the thing I squeezed around my actual job. Not a hobby I had to justify. My work.

And I knew I didn't want to go back to the career I'd built in marketing.

I'd been through some pretty challenging things, followed by major burnout, and somewhere in all of that I'd become quite lost. I knew much more clearly what I didn't want my life to look like than what I wanted to replace it with.

Art was the exception. I knew I wanted to make things. So I made space for it before I really had any evidence that it was going to work.

Making space

In April, I moved into a much smaller home. Suddenly, all of the art supplies, canvases and half-made things that had previously had space around me... didn't.

At around the same time, I was talking to TEDxLeith about creating work for Alchemy. For the first time in a while, my art had direction. There was somewhere for it to go.

Things seemed to be converging.

And so, despite my art making approximately no money, I rented a studio.

Financially, there was very little evidence to support this decision. Psychologically, it made perfect sense.

I'd heard variations of the advice that if you want to become something, you should surround yourself with people already doing it. I wanted to be an artist. So putting myself in a shared studio, surrounded by other artists making things, seemed like a fairly obvious place to start.

There was also something about physically going somewhere to make art that changed my relationship with it.

I wasn't waiting to become an artist anymore. I had somewhere to go to work.

Making it real

The studio gave the work a kind of legitimacy — probably to other people, but more importantly to me.

There is something surprisingly powerful about giving an ambition physical space.

Eventually I moved into a bigger studio within the building, and that's where the Villains wall appeared.

That wall has become one of the most recognisable visual parts of the project. It's also been incredibly useful online: you see it behind me and immediately understand that something is happening here. It's a scroll-stopper in a way that a few paintings propped around my home could never have been.

But more importantly, I needed the wall because I needed room for Villains to become what I imagined it could be.

From quite early on, I didn't picture Villains as ten portraits. I pictured hundreds. I have this number in my head that I want to reach at least 100 women before I take the project on tour. I want the accumulation to mean something. I want you to stand in front of all those faces and comprehend the scale of what women have trusted me with, and what we face together.

You can't make something physically big without eventually having to answer a very boring question: Where are you going to put it?

So I made room before I'd filled it.

The studio still doesn't pay for itself

I wish this were the point in the story where I tell you that taking the leap immediately paid off and my art now neatly covers the rent.

It doesn't.

The studio is currently self-funded.

I'm beginning to sell prints and people have contributed towards Villains, but I'm still investing far more into the project than it returns financially. My next step is funding.

Villains has become something that sits somewhere between an art project and a social project. Women are trusting me with their stories. A community is forming around them. The scale of what I'm trying to create has grown significantly.

I want to find ways of funding that work properly — including the time, materials and physical space it requires — so that it can keep growing sustainably.

But I don't regret paying for the studio before the work could pay for it. Because perhaps I had the order wrong at the beginning of the year...

I thought I'd make enough art, become successful enough, earn enough money, and eventually I'd feel entitled to call myself an artist.

Instead, I started behaving as though I already was one.

I gave the work my time. I surrounded myself with artists. I gave it walls. And then I started filling them.