Rene McBrearty - How to Remove a Single Strand Knot - as part of Life in a Northern Town - NewBridge Project

For the final exhibition of Life in a Northern Town, Newcastle-based artist Rene McBrearty has been paired with Leeds-based artist Jill McKnight. Both artists draw upon their individual and family history and experiences to explore themes such as identity, memory, family, women and gesture.

How to Remove a Single Strand Knot is Rene McBrearty's contribution to the exhibition.

McBrearty has created a new sculptural installation, presenting familiar McBrearty elements such as drawing, poetry, a riso printed zine, found objects and handmade sculptural forms alongside her first moving image work.

The setup reminds me of a domestic space with a comfy settee at the heart. Her sculptural forms are made from ceramic, leather and found materials. Ceramic shirt collars are draped over a clothes horse, and leather threads are piled on the floor. A number of other sculptures sit on a blouse that has been opened out on the floor. It is a casual arrangement with the suggestion that the process of making these objects took place in situ.

The video piece is situated in an old-fashioned larder. McBrearty and a number of other women of colour are sat round a kitchen table carrying out repetitive domestic actions such as polishing the table and kneading lumps of clay. The occasional subtitle reveals some of the conversations that take place as the women engage in their work.


The title refers to the fact that a single strand knot is found in afro hair and can prove difficult to remove. The removal of the knot becomes a metaphor for processing daily micro-aggressions and practicing self-care.

"The work thinks about the hidden labour carried out by women of colour while experiencing micro-aggressions which are everywhere, non-negotiable and relentless. The work explores the labour, productivity and the learning and unlearning of personal histories alongside the importance of sisterhood and community resilience in surviving. It is informed by her own experience, conversations with friends, her grandmother and the novel ‘Sula’ by Toni Morrison."

How to Remove a Single Strand Knot has been produced with the help of: Jola Olafimihan, Hannabiell Sanders, Wanjiru Mugo, Miles McBrearty, Matthew Pickering, Heather Bonnie Reid and Janina Sabaliauskaite.

For more information please visit 

https://thenewbridgeproject.com/events/rene-mcbrearty-jill-mcknight-life-northern-town/

Basic Income is coming to Scotland – Margaret Gilmour

The current exhibition at The NewBridge Project:Gateshead is 'Between Eating and Sleeping', by Toby Phips Lloyd. As part of his interactive exhibition, which explores public attitudes towards work (paid and unpaid labour), how free-time is valued, and potential futures of work, including policies like Universal Basic Income, Lloyd has programmed a number of related events. The first of these events was a screening of 'Basic Income is coming to Scotland' by Margaret Gilmour which I attended last night.

'Phillippe Van Parijs, describes Basic Income as “… an income paid unconditionally to individuals regardless of their family or household relationships, regardless of other incomes, and regardless of their past, present, or future employment status.” [1]

This concept has been presented as a possible solution to many of the problems that society faces today, and has gained support from both sides of the political spectrum.

The Scottish government announced in 2017 that it will commit to funding the first Basic Income trials in the UK. Four thousand people will be selected across four council areas to take part in the trials. These will be Glasgow, Edinburgh, Fife and North Ayrshire. The trials are expected to begin within the next 18 months.

Margaret Gilmour, Broadcast Journalist and Mum to two girls, travelled to Finland to find out how the recipients of basic income's lives have changed since receiving the payment, and to see if they had any advice for Scotland's pilot. Her resulting documentary outlines the arguments for Basic Income and interviews participants taking part in the current trials in Finland.

The screening was followed by a discussion about the potential benefits or pitfalls if Basic Income was implemented in the North East of England, and which other policies such as social housing reforms would need to the put in place for it to be successful.

- Would this be a way to achieve ecological justice?

- Is giving money to the already wealthy morally right?

- Would it improve working conditions?

- Would it encourage a move to a more balanced lifestyle?

- Would it foster a more community-led society?

- Is it a way of valuing unpaid labour such as childcare?

- Would it encourage a change in attitudes towards voluntary work?

Introducing Michael Di Rienzo - Circus Between Worlds artists

"Labor, love & playtime antics. Circus play as a perpetual passing of the hot potato. I'm hoping to sing songs for the tired and dispossessed child nesting in us all." Michael Di Rienzo

Beware of the 'Effort Trap'

As the January deadline for my dissertation looms, I find myself feeling guilty and worried because over the festive period I won't be spending lots of time working on my paper. Despite the many rational reasons for making family and friends my priority, I feel pressure, both from myself and society at large, to be productive. 

The following article has helped me realise that there is a difference between being productive and spending lots of time working, and provides some useful tips to become more productive without tiring yourself out.

All the more reason for some quality time off!

Nobody Cares How Hard You Work

by Oliver Burkeman

http://99u.com/articles/51908/nobody-cares-how-hard-you-work?utm_source=99U&utm_campaign=849727a0f8-Weekly_12_21_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bdabfaef00-849727a0f8-155119005

"As you sink into the couch, or slide onto the barstool, at the end of an exhausting workday, it’s hard not to experience the warm glow of self-congratulation. After all, you put in the hours, cranked through the to-do list; you invested the effort, and got things done. Surely you’re entitled to a little smugness?

Sorry, but at the risk of ruining that martini: maybe not. We chronically confuse the feeling of effort with the reality of results—and for anyone working in a creative field, that means the constant risk of frittering time and energy on busywork, instead of the work that counts.

Psychologists have long noticed what’s sometimes been called the “labor illusion:” when it comes to judging other people’s work, we might say we’re focused only on whether they did the job quickly and well—but really we want to feel they wore themselves out for us.

The behavioral economist Dan Ariely tells the story of a locksmith, who, as he got better at his work, started getting fewer tips, and more complaints about his prices.Each job took him so little time or effort that customers felt cheated—even though, pretty obviously, being super-fast is an asset in a locksmith, not a fault.

In 2011, a study by the Harvard Business School researchers Ryan Buell and Michael Norton found that people using a flight-search website actually preferred to wait longer for search results—provided they could watch a detailed progress display to see the site “working hard” to canvas each airline’s database.

This would be no more than an intriguing quirk of consumer behavior—if it weren’t for the fact that we apply the same twisted standards to ourselves. Call it the “Effort Trap:” it’s dangerously easy to feel as though a 10-hour day spent plowing through your inbox, or catching up on calls, was much more worthwhile than two hours spent in deep concentration on hard thinking, followed by a leisurely afternoon off.Yet any writer, designer or web developer will tell you it’s the two focused hours that pay most—both in terms of money and fulfillment. (In Mason Currey’s 2013 book Daily Rituals, a compendium of artists’ and authors’ work routines, almost nobody reports spending more than four or five hours a day on their primary creative tasks.) Indeed, meaningful work doesn’t always lead to exhaustion at all: a few hours of absorption in it can be actively energizing—so if you’re judging your output by your tiredness, you’re sure to be misled.

It’s doubly hard to avoid the Effort Trap because our culture so strongly reinforces its deceptive message: Hard work is ultimately what matters. From childhood, parents and teachers drum into us the moral virtue of effort, and the importance of “doing your best”. Numerous approaches to productivity—even the best ones, like David Allen’s Getting Things Done—encourage a “cross-it-off-the-list” mindset:They’re so preoccupied with clarifying and keeping track of your to-dos, you forget to ask if they’re the right tasks to begin with.

And too many workplaces still subtly communicate to employees the idea that intense effort, usually in the form of long hours, is the best route to a promotion. In fact, though, if you can do your job brilliantly and still leave at 3 p.m. each day, a really good boss shouldn’t object. And by the same token, you shouldn’t cite all the effort you put in when making your case for a raise. Why should a results-focused boss even care?

In America and northern Europe, the roots of the Effort Trap may well lie in the “Protestant work ethic,” the old Calvinist idea that being a hard worker was evidence that you’d been pre-selected for Heaven. To reach creativity heaven, though, you’ll need a different approach—one that prioritizes doing the right things, not just lots of things.

The well-known advice to do the most important tasks first in the day is probably still the best; that way, even if you do lapse into busywork, you won’t be wasting your best energies on it. And if your work situation permits it, experiment with radically limiting your working hours: The added constraint tends to push the most vital work to center-stage. You could set electronic reminders through the day, as a prompt to ask if you need to change your focus.

But above all, remember that tiring yourself out—or scheduling every minute of your day with work—isn’t a reliable indicator of a day well spent. Or to put it more cheerfully: The path to creative fulfillment might take a lot less effort than you think."

Paying Artists by Moira Jeffrey on axis web

http://www.axisweb.org/features/news-and-views/in-focus/paying-artists-by-moira-jeffrey/

David McLeavy, Work! Work! Work! 2013. Image courtesy of Leon Read Photography

Guest columnist Moira Jeffrey examines the growing discussion around the need to pay artists

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I recently sat around a table in Edinburgh with more than a dozen artists, curators and other freelancers in the visual arts. Our workshop was part of a symposium, Labour of Love, devised by Jenny Richards, formerly of UK galleries Collective and Cubitt and now director of Konsthall C in Stockholm. 

Before we began a day that examined the way that artists are exploring the questions of work and workplaces, we endeavoured to understand our own relationship with labour.We drew diagrams that analysed how much of our weekly work might constitute part of our own core practice and how much was activity that subsidised or supported it. Somewhere in that equation we examined what we got paid for and what we did for free. 

The stark reality was that for everyone the peaks and troughs were in the wrong place, with work time outweighing studio time for artists, and the work we loved the most least likely to be remunerated. As a freelance writer (even when working on big projects with big institutions I’ve been employed only one year in the last 17) I am painfully aware that my own position is often contradictory. In the transactions of the cultural world sometimes I am the person in the room who is getting paid and sometimes the only unsalaried person at a table where everyone wants my opinion but no one will pay my train ticket.

The momentum around paying artists should be simple and unstoppable. Publicly funded organisations simply must do it. The Scottish Artists Union has long campaigned for equitable rates of pay and recently had its guidelines recognised by the funding body Creative Scotland. In September 2013 the SAU was joined by the Artist’s Union England. Arts Council England now requires its National Portfolio Organisations to embrace fair pay under strictures that their compliance will be monitored. 

The Arts Council of Northern Ireland has recognised the fee structures proposed by Visual Artists Ireland. The Arts Council of Ireland and Dublin City Council are amongst the bodies that stipulate that funding provided by them must clearly indicate payments for artists as a condition of their funding provision. Axisweb is one of many organisations and prominent individuals who have signed up to support The Paying Artists campaign led by a_n / AIR. Artists are in the process of building or reinforcing pay structures that reflect those of their colleagues in Equity, BECTU or the Musicians Union.

But if the position of artists pay in institutional and public relationships is now officially enshrined, why does it continue to be so dismal? As one part of the system finally lumbers into gear, much deeper shifts in the economies undermine it. The austerity agenda is biting deep into English culture budgets. The increases in casual, part-time and zero hours contracts as a mainstay of the wider economy are impacting on artists’ abilities to support their practice. Technology brings freedom but also a new understanding of “content” and “information” as freely available resources rather than the product of real time and labour.

Artists and freelance cultural workers have long-evolved strategies of exchange, mutual labour and self-support but artists are currently finding that a position at the forefront of new, more extensive “sharing economies” is not uncomplicated. Like the dilemmas of urban gentrification, exposing cracks in the system that can usefully be occupied for the mutual benefit of cultural workers often leaves them open to the shock troops of developers, corporations or more aggressive economic forces. And progress is very slow. Gallery cultures, residency schemes, commissioners and other individuals and organisations that should know better, still don’t get it. 

For younger artists there is the insidious suggestion that working for free creates opportunities.Some of this is part of wider employment culture of internships in culture and the creative industries. For more established artists, there is the expectation that senior status brings economic independence or that the market solves all problems. A senior contemporary artist recently told me that they personally paid for the production costs of a high profile show at one of the most prominent public venues in the country. There was insufficient budget because there was the expectation that, at their level, a commercial gallery would shell out.

The issue of course is not only rates of pay for sessional work or exhibition fees, although these are essential places to start. It is about the availability of housing, of affordable studio spaces, of production resources and about job availability and job mobility in those traditional sectoral roles where artists often work such as gallery technicians, educators and information assistants.

The question of equal access to culture has recently become a stick with which politicians like to beat institutions, but the question of who gets to make culture is less spoken about in the era of tuition fees and the housing crisis. There is no use grumbling about posh people in the arts from Marcus Mumford to Eddie Redmayne if we don’t recognise and address the systemic failings and web of inequalities that transformed the radical social mobility of cultural education in the sixties to the finishing school it is now. The excellent work of the Arts Emergency campaign sets out to overturn the trend by mentoring and activism.

What can we do? Well we must be open. We must try to recognise our own positions and blind spots.Writers and editors like myself must think much harder about what we ask artists to do in terms of their time, resources and use of their images or intellectual capital. Institutions must use their spending power both wisely and imaginatively to support artists. And we must examine them openly if they fail to do so. They must subject their policies around volunteering or internships to thorough ethical and legal scrutiny. But above all they need to think strategically and holistically about what paying artists actually means. 

It means production budgets as well as fees; it means travel expenses, it means thinking hard about organising and locating meetings and paying artists for their time on installation for example. It means thinking genuinely and developmentally about what opportunities really are and distinguishing them from exploitation or unfair labour demarcation. It means understanding artists support both as a fees table and as an ecology that should be considered at all times. Above all when artists say no thanks as much as yes please, all of us must listen.

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Contributed by Moira Jeffrey, April 2015

Moira Jeffrey is a writer based in Glasgow.