Last year was going to be big for artist Fiona Whelan. Since 2018 she has been working on a complex collaborative project about masculinity with Brokentalkers Theatre, Rialto Youth Project and a variety of community groups in Dublin.
Last year they were due to finally show their work to the public. The first part, a theatre performance called To Be Frank, fell foul of the spring lockdown. The second part, a major exhibition, needed to be reconceived several times in line with changing restrictions.
“The path to reimagining the work was not daunting,” says Whelan. “That’s what artists do. But we had no sense of what might work in the future – what venues would be allowed to reopen, what might be accessible. So we were constantly forced to reassess the work.”
Whelan and her collaborators eventually found a way to show the work to the public, with an outward-facing exhibition at the Lab in Dublin and a permanent online complement at whatdoesheneed.com. But there was also a secondary challenge: maintaining creative energy as the domestic pressures of lockdown life loomed unavoidably large.
Whelan was jst one of 83 parent-artists who contributed to a survey carried out by the Mothership Project about the specific pressures of 2020’s lockdown on the parenting artist’s practice. The survey, which complements research and opportunities that the network have developed since its foundation in 2012, was designed to “make visible the experiences of artists who often work in isolation, and understand the implications of the pandemic on their ability to make art”.
So says Michelle Browne, who designed the survey with fellow parent-artists Leah Hilliard and Seoidín O’Sullivan. She says “the main impetus came after the Arts Council conducted a survey about how artists were experiencing the pandemic, and there wasn’t one question about children/childcare. Many of the artists we surveyed were responsible for all the childcare during lockdown, and that meant a huge percentage of artists were not getting to work at all. That puts them at a big disadvantage when it comes to creating bodies of work or applying for funding.
“We believe that it is important that people are aware of that, because it will have a longer-term impact – a Covid gap in their CV – that we can’t fully understand yet.”
Making art in lockdown
- 45% of respondents said they were doing all of the childcare.
- 45% of respondents said they were doing between 1-5 hours of work on their practice a week.
- 2.5% of respondents said they were doing 20 or more hours a week on their art practice.
- 24% of respondents said they had to turn down offers of work due to lack of childcare.
- 56% of respondents said they had not applied for funding since the beginning of the pandemic: they had no time or the time frame was too short for them to complete the application.
From the 83 artists surveyed, artistic practice was indeed a significant loss during the 2020 lockdown. Schools closed in mid-March and didn’t reopen until September, while many childcare amenities and activities were curtailed throughout the summer. As a result, 45 per cent of respondents estimated that they were managing to do one to five hours of artistic work a week, with 11 per cent unable to dedicate time to it at all.
For a majority of respondents, creativity was replaced by caregiving: 45 per cent of respondents said they were doing all of the childcare, with a partner working inside or outside the home. A further 10 per cent per cent were single parents caring for their children alone. Twenty-four per cent of respondents said that they had to turn down offers of work due to lack of childcare.
For one respondent, the experience felt like women were “forced to return to the domestic sphere like nothing [else] has this century. I am concerned about the changing roles in my home.”
These worries were echoed by another respondent: “Because my work brings in less money, I am the one who minds the kids now full time. It feels like being back in the ’50s. Where artists without kids might upgrade their skills etc to fill the time stuck at home, we are fully absorbed by family life, which is beautiful but also exhausting, and the fear of not being able to continue or get back to work is getting bigger.”
Whelan says her particular circumstances made the new reality of life a little easier to deal with than some. “I actually work from home a lot anyway [so] in relation to motivation, setting boundaries on the working day etc, that part wasn’t an issue for me. The challenge was that now the whole family– my husband, and two children aged six and nine – was also based at home, so my mental and physical workspace was invaded. Carving out a quiet, focused space to be creative in a house with children, whose lives have also been hugely disrupted, was challenging.”
Whelan worked hard with her partner to create a timetable that would accommodate her need for a physical and mental space to work. “This is written on to a timetable on the fridge, so our children have a sense of each day and know who they have access to and when.”
Elsewhere, however, she observed that “a lot of the home-schooling fell on women, which highlights the management job that many women have in caring for their children. Even in homes where the workload workload – childcare and housework – may be shared equally, there is typically one person managing and delegating the tasks to be done, [something] that is not often valued externally as a significant contribution to society.”
She also saw that mental load become heightened during lockdown, “as children’s needs were all to be met in the home”. Parents had to “motivate, stimulate, educate and support children through a really tough and sometimes scary time, while trying to maintain a creative practice and an income”.
Mark Cullen and Gillian Lawler are practising artists with two children, one of whom has special needs, and the 2020 lockdown made it very difficult for either of them to commit time to their creative practice
Mark Cullen and Gillian Lawler are practising artists with two children, one of whom has special needs, and the 2020 lockdown made it very difficult for either of them to commit time to their creative practice. Lawler had just opened an exhibition in the Molesworth Gallery as lockdown began, while Cullen was due to travel to Croatia in late spring to install a site-specific sculpture. They were disappointed that these projects failed to reach their potential opportunities because of Covid, but with schools closed there was little opportunity to commit time to their artistic practice.
As Lawler explains, sustaining an artistic practice at home was not an option, as their daughter, who has a “moderate intellectual disability, needs engagement with everything she does, all the time”.
Cullen, Lawler and Whelan were all lucky, however, to be deep in projects already, where work needed to be reimagined rather than newly generated. Many of the respondents were not so fortunate. Twenty-two per cent had exhibitions cancelled with no pay, 18.5 per cent had talks cancelled with no pay, and 40 per cent had workshops cancelled with no pay. Thirty-seven per cent chose “other”, mentioning cancelled performances, cancelled residencies, postponed exhibitions and lost sale of works.
Cullen, who is director of Pallas Project/ Studios, spent much of the period between March and September, when schools reopened, working on bringing Pallas exhibitions to digital or, where restrictions made it possible, physical fruition. He also managed to find a temporary home for his Croatian project: Towards Super-connection, which was installed at Lough Crew; he hopes it will travel to Villa Croce Museum Contemporary Art, Genoa later this year. And both he and Lawler successfully applied for Arts Council bursaries to work on future creative projects.
However, with schools closed again and childcare unavailable, they have had to radically rethink timelines for their work. Luckily, the couple still had access to the studio space at Pallas. “It is a fraction of what you would normally get,” Cullen says, “but we do manage to get some studio time, and we try to share it fairly so that we both have time for our own personal work.”
Whelan finds herself more organised during this new period of domestic confinement. Packed lunches are made every morning, anticipating one small element of the children’s daily needs, and the timetable still hangs on the family fridge so the children know who to ask for help at different periods of the day.
As far as future artistic projects go, if 2020 taught Whelan anything it was to “Covid proof” the work, a hard lesson that artists from all disciplines have had to take on board as we head into another year of uncertainty.
Full details of The Mothership Project's Research at themothershipproject.wordpress.com
