‘There is no wrong way of making art, and there is not one way of being an artist’ – in conversation with Hettie Judah

One of the funny things is that the earlier book, How Not to Exclude Artist Mothers and Other Parents, was intended for institutions. But 99% of the readers were artists. You simply can’t choose who your audience ends up being. Over the seven years that I’ve been giving talks, organizing exhibitions and events for artist-parents, this is the question I always get: how can I return to the art world? There’s no easy answer to it. I really wanted to give people the feeling that they didn’t have to wait for structural change, that they could themselves be part of creating the art world they want.

Throughout the book I’m quite frank about aspects of the system that I think are really broken. There’s a chapter on commercial galleries for example, because people always want to know how to get gallery representation. But I say right at the beginning that it’s not the right fit for everyone. I’m genuinely interested in a study into the number of people who consider themselves artists compared to the number who have commercial gallery representation. I estimate it’s something like ten per cent. And I think we really need to shift the way we think about commercial representation, because it is not a measurement of success.

What’s interesting about Bobby is that she’s essentially made a double re-entry. What was really interesting after her first comeback is that she had to find a completely different audience. The feminist art world was not welcoming her back with open arms, they weren’t interested in motherhood as a theme. The work she was doing around mental health wasn’t necessarily embraced by the art world either; it was more of an intersection of performance and activism. And I think there’s a lesson hidden in her life and her great success at a later age: sometimes, when you find that the structures you work within are excluding you, you need to move around them rather than keep banging against the same brick wall. When we look now at what Bobby was doing in the eighties and nineties, we regard it as incredibly important performance art. But at the time it wasn’t seen that way, she was performing in small regional theaters, completely invisible to the visual art world.

Absolutely. Everyone should reread Pollock. What’s also very interesting in this discussion is the fact that Ireland now has a basic income for artists. That’s not only important for the artists’ work and their mental health, but simply for a livable existence. And there has been a very positive economic impact, every euro invested generated the equivalent of around €1.80 in return. So it makes sense on every level.

I think it would be really, really beneficial. It acknowledges that people returning to the art world, or trying to build momentum at a certain point, really do need support. I’ve sat on prize juries where the prize went to someone whose children were already a bit older, and that recognition and financial support simply catapulted them into a whole other phase of their work. Their work improved enormously. Their self-belief grew.

Ok. That puts me in my place… I do think of you as a friend.

It’s just like being at school. The art world is a place where you have to be incredibly sensitive on the one hand and have a very thick skin on the other. Most people are socially awkward. A lot of people are lonely, but the intimacy you feel is often real, while the structures that support that intimacy are not.

I think good institutions send out an access rider to everyone as standard procedure, with all options included, that’s a way to stop people feeling guilty about requesting support or access. And access riders in relation to parenthood are also about physical access: if you’re breastfeeding, you need a space to pump, otherwise you’ll get mastitis and that affects your ability to work. So there are two levels. One is that much of the architecture of our institutions was designed without the idea that caregivers would be part of them, no spaces for breastfeeding, no ways of being there with children. The other is simply acknowledging that most people have some shit they’re carrying. Making your needs clear from the start is genuinely professional, it’s laying out the conditions under which you can function. In the UK, the accessibility budget generally sits completely separately from the production budget. I think that’s possibly how it should be.

For me it is the conclusion and the final piece of the puzzle. It’s a book I had already been planning from the moment How Not to Exclude Artists, Mothers and Other Parents came out. There will be other things that need doing, it’s not as if the story is finished, but for me this is my last book on this subject. I have other things I want to write, and other things I have written that will come out next year, including a book on female desire. And I’m not the only one working in this field. You have clearly done very important work and continue to do very important work. Colleagues like Sascia Bailer and Diana Gravina do very important work. There will be a new generation, and then another generation after that.

It’s my last publication on it. I should say, when the manifesto first came out, the publisher said it would probably only be in print for a year, because once it was out, everything would change and we wouldn’t need it anymore. That was four years ago. It’s still selling. Things have changed, there’s more awareness, but there certainly hasn’t been an institutional revolution. I keep calling for revolution. But the revolution just doesn’t happen. What’s wrong with these people?

I mean, the whole point of this book is that I genuinely believe in art. I want people to know that there is no wrong way of making art, that there is not just one way of being an artist. There exists an outdated idea that an artist should look a certain way and behave a certain way, and that’s simply not the case. There are infinite ways of being and behaving and making work. It can fit you and how you need it to be. It doesn’t need to conform to some early twentieth-century modernist cliché.

My son works as a gallery technician and often installs exhibitions, and people don’t even say thank you. Or I work with artists who are quite casually rude, they say things like: I probably shouldn’t have been in that show, I don’t think it was the right fit for me, or I regret having offered my work at that price. This is just a really unpleasant way to interact with people. And very often we can become so self-absorbed, especially when we’re working alone in our studios and don’t interact much with other people, we really lose sight of what’s going on around us. It comes down to this: treat others the way you would want people to treat your family members.