Artists’ lives: ecologies for resilience

Susan Jones works as an independent arts researcher and writer who holds specialist knowledge and insight about the social and political environment for artists and contemporary visual arts.

She has just completed her independent qualitative and longitudinal study Artists' lives: ecologies for resilience, formed around case studies of 14 visual artists from three English regions. She has been working on it for the last two years.

She argues that successive policies since have marginalised artists’ position in the infrastructures and ‘ecology’ of the arts. Arts policy’s ‘market economy’ approach has the effect of undermining its stated aspirations to demonstrate equity and inclusion across the arts.

Owen Kelly reviews a pre-publication version of the report, and comments on it. He notes that, rather than “the usual suspects”, the report has been sup­port­ed by Axisweb, CAMP: con­tem­po­rary art mem­ber­ship plat­form, and Cre­ative Land Trust.