Attributive adjective Artist

On being working class in the art world

Writing is a way of finding, isn’t it? I’ve found a lot recently and best of all I’ve found some of my why’s. If you read my Mother, not a mother piece, you’ll understand that I do it for my niece and nephews. Being a role model, a cheerleader to young people and an overall embarrassing aunt who tries really hard to have rizz (is that the term these days?!) is my greatest honour. But I also do it for me and my ancestors. For the family line. For the voice that I now find myself with in spaces that I’d never had access to as a young person. Here’s the piece that helped me to define what it is I'm doing. It’s messy, perhaps because it's a multi-part unravelling of my identity, my what and why.

Sometimes I wonder if poetry is what shelters me from being too real or too messy - from telling the whole truth. I’m purging things. Realigning to prepare for another new chapter. The thing I’m aching to purge the most is the mask. The code switch. The pretending that I fit in, in the crowds who want me to be something different, more refined, than what I am. My desire to fit in, is also waning. We are all amalgamations of experiences starting early in our lives. My experiences have given me the tenacity and audacity to make space for myself and say that I fit in here too - in the art world, in the trustee meeting, in the gallerists living room standing on his silk rug with my heels on. What I'm pondering most comes down to class. Working class. Is it just another label and another box that we squeeze ourselves into? It matters to me and I’m not sure if that's something I need to purge too. Bin bags, charity shop donations and sentimental pictures. A foot in two different worlds that tell me what I am, and what I’m not.

Working Class Arrogance.

This soft life trend that’s going around is nice, isn’t it? What a thing. A soft life. I see a lot of people talking about building a soft life when they haven’t even been pummeled, tenderized, by the hard life. How can we know something if we haven’t met its opposition? How can we expect softness without the hard work that it comes from? I’ve given careful critiques to artists who had never really had to find a way to squeeze through the doors, or even had the second thought to recognise that they’re standing on a silk rug. I’ve seen those people ask for more softness from the world with the tone of a victim. Soft things often take up more space because they’re full of air. A truly soft life isn’t easy to come by, in my world at least. Soft things can be flexible like a pillow but even pillows put in work every night, holding heavy heads and tired dreams. This soft life idea often feels like a fallacy. Or am I just a sceptic? A little bit resentful, maybe? Is my working class arrogance showing?…that thing that drives my audacity to just do it despite hurdles, without the softness.

Poem of an Era, 2024 - concrete, pillowcases, plaster, polyurethane spray foam, gold leaf

Pride. Let’s put that in the corner for now

I’ve been taught the most working class value there is. Pride. Dad might say we aren’t working class and he grew up with a curfew on the streets of Dartford in the 60’s and 70’s, got a job at 15. It’s pride. Mum, who works on the Tesco check outs in her 60s doesn’t appreciate being called working class, she prefers lower middle thank you very much. The truth is we are working class and I’m proud. Fucking proud. Proud enough now to not pretend anymore - while still undoing those lessons that make me think I should pretend. Great Grandad was a coal man. Grandad left school at 14. Enrolled in the navy. A proud man. That’s what they called him at his funeral. That’s how he was described every day. They were boxers. Great grandad would fight in the back of a pub on a Sunday. Came home with bloodied knuckles. Too proud to lose. Too proud for gloves. Grandad boxed in the navy - extra rations if you’d been in the ring, and he loved his food. Like I do. And proud of it. Always kind, but a fighter if needed. I didn’t know the extent of the fights until I went to his dying bedside and told him I’ve started boxing again. It’s in my blood. Thick and real. A proud man’s sport. And I made him proud, he said.

Ghosts. We’ve all got ‘em.

I was born in Gravesend hospital - an infirmary turned maternity ward, now abandoned. A home to ghosts. That’s where I’m from and I’m done running from it. Running only makes the chase more exciting for the demons. I grew up working, since the age of 12. In the back of a chip shop. Cash in hand. Illegal. At 13 I was up front, proudly wrapping those chips in paper 3 times a week. I’ve always been told that I couldn’t do things because I didn’t have. So I’ve always made a way. The first person in my family to go to University, Mum says I’ve turned posh. Should've gotten a nice boyfriend and a nice job. But we all find our ways around and out and deeper into boxes in different ways, seeking softness where we think it might be and paying the price that comes with it. I had to try to run as far away as I could from my background just so I could come back when I realised that actually those further up the class ladder are no better than us. That life isn’t softer, it’s just different, and maybe even a bit lonely when you don’t recognise yourself in it.

Each of us have a different way of compressing the generational traumas - the class struggles and the tough parts of life that compound us into the little diamantes in those gold hoops that you wear on the weekend. In my family a way into softness meant finding your power, finding a purpose. It meant having a baby, young - mum status. You make something of yourself from your own flesh, and then you make it as a single mum. Council houses and benefits. Because at that age, and round these ends, baby daddy doesn’t usually stay. He’s running too, remember. Those demons aren’t far behind and there’s softness anywhere but here. Or you make it as a tradey. A builder, a plumber, an electrician, heck scaffolding will do. But survival is bigger than cash. The ghosts still chase even when you’ve got a little bit in your pocket. You can drink your way around it, soften the blows, ease tired muscles with a shot of tequila rose, a rum and coke, and a pint of fosters down the social club. Get anova one in will ya?! I'm from that world. I was once more of a Lambrini girl….yeah, I know. But when people meet me and see how well spoken, how ambitious and “how far it seems I've come” they don’t really think I’m working class - even once described as Dickension...But that's romantic. That’s the poetry I question now.

A colleague once told me that I’m not working class - said he’d never met a working class person who had worked at Yale. News flash. He had. Working at Yale is very different from going to Yale. Trust me on that, babes. I don’t fit into his definition of what working class means, and I don’t want to define myself as working class in ways that are easily digestible because we’re all multitudes anyway. But this pretty little box is still calling me to sit in it.

Maybe my working-class-ness matters because I’ve worked at Yale, because I’ve pulled up a seat in Trustee meetings and sat on the Board in places where my class status says I shouldn't be. I was the only working class British person working at the Yale Center for British Art. I didn’t recognise my own culture in a space that was supposed to represent British culture. I walked into my job everyday seeing only pictures of people and things I couldn’t really speak with. There was one picture on the 4th floor, back left bay that I partially recognised. It was a picture of a man covered in coal wearing a tired expression with his hungry family. A coal man, like great-grandad - hung next to Turner sunsets. The setting seemed off. I’d seen that image through a different, intimate lens - a photo of Grandad as a kid outside his multi-family household. A small brick building with one outdoor toilet in the background. The whole four families stood together. Clean. Smiling. I proposed an exhibition that offered a broader story of labour and class in the UK - including images of village hall or social club parties, like I still go to now. Elderly women eating packed sandwiches on Brighton beach. Just like Grandma. Illustrations of maids at the pub enjoying themselves on a Friday night. Like Mum. Images of non-white and non-priviledged British people. The normal folk doing normal things, enjoying their moments outside of work - Pictures that were in the collection, but not on public display, pictures that still haven’t been digitised to be available in the online catalogue...

The head of exhibitions scoffed at me, said that as an Institution ‘we’ represented the artist's lens and the image of “peasants” on the wall on the 4th floor was the artist's lens. I didn’t appreciate that. I hadn’t worked so hard to get to where I was to still have my ancestors represented as only one thing. As a simple contrast to the pretty watercolours. That’s a very basic poem. There’s that pride again. But it mattered to me, and I know the New Haven locals, the normal non-yaley folk - felt the cold, removed glare of the aristocrats too.

The fight. Keep. But let’s soften a little bit. Can’t fit through doors if you’re not flexible.

I’ve had many encounters that I carry with me to the boxing gym. Sometimes I just have to sweat the restraint out of my pores. The restraint that it takes to talk a certain way, to ask for approval, in a certain tone. If you meet me at work and then see me with my family you might not recognise me as the same person - unless you recognise the multitudes too. I guess I do still run from my ghosts, but those demons are close behind me and every now and then my peers see that fire when it catches me. When I’m frustrated I might drop a “mate” with a hard T into chat. That's the warning sign and I need to tread careful(ly). I’ve often felt like there’s no space for me to be incompetent, or to speak my mind entirely. If I fail - and I have failed a few times in my life - it's a nose to the floor and the count has started 3…2…. You just gotta get back up even if your head is spinning and your body hurts.

“Working Class” has become an attributive adjective to the title of artist along with “woman” and “black”. These artists are still kept at arms length from the overall establishment - the art world still isn’t integrated, but it can fool you sometimes if you let it. These are the artists who pour from their soul because they have something to say, culture to represent in a world that doesn’t look at the whole picture. These are the artists who stand opposite to the art school kids with the trust funds rolling around naked and calling it performance art. I love the Working Class artists networks, the for artists by artists communities popping up. I don’t want to be fed what it means to be of a culture by people who are looking at it from above anymore. I wonder are there enough of us in the positions that we need to be - enough of us wearing those shiny veneers that draw in the people with the big bucks? Enough of us in positions where we can fuel our own communities sustainably? Enough of us to tell the stories of culture as a whole, in a way that really resonates with all audiences? Remember, it’s the soft life that’s appealing. It’s the spacious, air filled, nicey nice, surface level exploration of a fucking brush stroke, It’s the poetry of a curatorial statement.

So what is it that I’m really craving? Is it that I’m still purging the mental contortions that keep me from growing too big? That sitting in a box means I’ll forever be asking for permission? Is it that fight, those demons, the generational trauma, that’s still chasing me? Or is it the community, the no need to pretend, the deep breath of intimacy and recognition, that you’re from somewhere and something that looks and speaks and feels similar? Can I truly have it all, the celebrations in the social club with the cheese and pineapple sticks and homemade cupcakes AND small plates at the fancy spot with the little clear blobs of tasty decorative gel sauce things. Am I just tired of having a foot in two different worlds? I’m craving a little more integration. A wink and a nod.

When I write or sculpt, I’m free. It doesn’t matter where I’m from, and at the same time my life experiences have shaped my voice. Somehow, now I’m left in the soft grip of threads unraveling and a life built on concrete floors, fighting to reclaim the thing I was born into. Because that’s what we do, the working class. We’re fighters. And I’m too proud to pretend right now.