Students

After his show for New Work Scotland Programme at Collective Gallery, Edinburgh and before his solo show at Liverpool’s Royal Standard this year, Oliver shares some thoughts on his career as an artist so far, including ideas on how to make a self-made residency and how to organize your own ‘graduate diary’.

Richard Taylor: What have you done since graduating?

Oliver Braid: After graduating in 2006 from my BA at Falmouth College of Arts I moved to Liverpool where I lived until 2008. During my time there I worked as a visitor assistant for A Foundation and at the Bluecoat Display Centre. One person, Roxy Topia, was hugely influential on my development: I lived with her for nine months and during that time we produced an exhibition called A Proper Horrorshow at Red Wire Gallery. Also, through working at Bluecoat Display Centre I ended up curating an exhibition for them called Wunderkammer.

I then decided to apply for the MFA at Glasgow School of Art (GSA), moved back to live with my parents and spent a lot of time with old schools friends: smoked and drank a lot, went to fancy dress parties and snuck home late at night. Just before I moved to Glasgow I was honest with myself: what I liked doing most was being around friends, making costumes and staring at people on Facebook. Already enrolled on the course at GSA, I decided to make a go of it and focus on these interests as a new way of working.

After two stimulating and confidence building years on the MFA I graduated again in 2010 and continue to make exhibitions with people who have supported me a lot. I also work as part of an artist support group at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow called ‘Artist Anonymous’, where ten artists meet every three weeks with a qualified therapist to talk through all the problems and stresses involved with being an artist.


RT: Do you still think of your career development in terms of an academic year?

OB: When I was growing up my mum was a school teacher. So that way structuring the year has always been present throughout my life. The academic year is still something very ingrained into me, I think in both the Septembers that followed on from my graduating years I was definitely very aware that I wasn’t going back to study.

2011 was probably the first time I thought about the year in terms of January to December. I am writing this in December 2011 so I’m very much in the mind-set of reviewing the previous twelve months. When 2011 started I made an open but directed resolution – to try and become more deserving of both love and money.

2012 may be my year to take the fact that I am an artist more seriously and to stop feeling guilty about it. To stop thinking about the year’s framework in an academic sense is a move towards this; to celebrate that I am a working person with budgets and commitments.  



RT: What is your view on art education today, is it a placing for artists to make mistakes and learn from them through self-criticality, art history / theory awareness and tutorial discussion - or should there be an actual discourse around the practicing of a 'skill'?


OB: I wasn’t prepared for the freedom of being at art school for the first time and hardly made anything in my first year at Falmouth. But that doesn’t mean that I think there should be more initial structure: a lack of work was what made me develop the self-motivated working style essential for being an artist. My flatmate Ellie Harrison and I refer to it as self-made busy-ness – implying that realistically for artists, if they decided to give up there wouldn’t be a huge army of people begging them to continue. Most artists, even when they’re getting paid, are responsible for being both the team and the cheerleader.

Post graduating is such a zombie-like time for a lot of people. There should be a service, provided by art schools, to ease you back into real life. I suppose we could say that it’s necessary for that situation to occur because it probably eradicates a lot of art graduates who aren’t willing to put the time and effort into progressing, but I still wish there was more support in that transition phase.

Most artists/art students are practising a skill already, and what people should be thinking about when they’re still in the school environment (but also throughout their careers) is getting closer to pinning down that skill. That skill is identifying what they have to offer to the world that no one else does. This is less about being a great stone carver or oil painter, its more about understanding how you contribute to the world and how you can alchemize this special quality into something that can be worked on or ‘polished’.

It’s just getting to understand your personality better and how it impacts on your output. If you’re not making a huge amount of money from your vocation you have to at least make sure you love what you’re doing. It’s too easy to forget this. Recently before going to the studio in the morning I took to writing on my hand ‘I’d rather be doing this than anything else in the world’.  

Art education should find a better way to make this need for both self-discipline and allowance of pleasure very clear from as early as possible – they are two of the most important key skills that an artist can have. These skills are more about general day-to-day working as an artist, whereas the previous point about pinning down your ‘artistic personality’ is more about creating the most gift wrapped offering for others that you can: one which you can have a dialogue with for as long as you practice. This dialogue between your creative output and the fact you are the producer of that output, a living person with a sense of biographical narrative, is the most important discourse that occurs in an artistic trajectory. 

RT: What did you perceive you might do after college, and how did you set about it?

OB: I did ‘perceive’ that after college I would keep on working towards being a better artist, which is what I did and what I think I’m always trying to do:

I resolved that I wouldn’t make any objects unless I had an exhibition offer – I didn’t want to waste money or time or space. What I did instead was get a new desk, new laptop and read lots of books. From June to December 2010 I made myself think I was on a self-made residency (in my bedroom) and research trip. I thought I would hide away for this period and secretly get cleverer, clear up some ideas of how I wanted to work, and why I would work in that way.

My two real saviors were starting a full-time diary and keeping a strict schedule. Every day I would get up at 7.30 and read the paper for half an hour – choosing articles that interested me, not what I thought I ‘should’ be reading. Then I would check emails and get ready. After this I used to watch an online lecture and take notes for an hour or two – either from something like TED or the Yale online archive. Then I would take two hours to search for opportunities or write applications for things I had already found (I called this section Opps/Apps). I would then take an hour to work on small drawings (just to keep my hand in!) and then write my diary for the day (usually about ten pages of reflection). Finally before bed I would read for an hour – nightly alternating fact and fiction just like in the film Clueless.

My flatmate, after reading Hans Abbing’s Why Are Artist’s Poor, also put this idea in my mind that if you haven’t become successful in the two years following your graduation you should give up and do something else. I don’t know if I think this is a very sound piece of advice but at the time it did mean I was thinking very much about how I might work over the two years following my MFA. Part of that ‘schedule’ became a building up period, or the first six months after graduating.

I think small bursts of these times are really useful and I’m hoping to return to this state for a short time in 2012, but perhaps this is what research residencies are actually for?


RT: When you were studying, what advice and encouragement was missing, and can you provide this information in hindsight?

OB: I wish they had explained this ‘audience’ thing better – that each person isn’t always working towards the same audience, so competition is less relevant.

I felt a strong a sense of competition when I was in the second year of my MFA but a lot my peers would dismiss this. I find that people who dismiss competition are usually the most competitive, but in an underhand way. I would rather people were more open with their desires and frustrations because it makes them more human to me. I have real life examples of people who have openly criticized me for talking about my competitive nature and pretended they weren’t interested in it, but then they turn out to be more so career minded and competitive.

It’s seen to be embarrassing to talk about your desire to succeed because people are scared of not succeeding. For some reason ‘playing it cool’ is seen to be more respectable. Personally I love what I’m doing and I’m okay with other people knowing that I love it. Logically then, why would I not want to do this all the time? This is what career success for an artist means to me – the financial stability to be able to get up every morning and know that you have the pleasure of going to the studio to develop projects you enjoy, projects which you are then able to offer up on a public platform for others to find interesting. If that mission fails then it shouldn’t be seen as embarrassing but sad, as it is always sad when a much worked for dream fails. To keep this aspect of career dreaming hushed up is only to perpetuate the idea that failure is embarrassing, which at worse keeps people producing safer work that they project as more career-viable.



RT: What other information or advice can you provide that is relevant to your profession that you would pass on to others completing their arts based degrees now?

OB: It’s perfect that your question uses the word profession, as each individual artist should remember they are in a profession. Sometimes I think it’s even more helpful to imagine oneself as working within a larger company or branch – for me the Glasgow branch. This means that you would be considerate, friendly and polite to your co-workers but also be aware of who good work-mates are and who aren’t. The ground changes on this latter part all the time and a major causation of this can be career anxiety.

I would advise that any kind of jealously is pointless unless the person you are jealous of is making the exact same work as you, in exactly the same way and is being more successful. I tried to set up that statement to make it sound like an impossible situation because being jealous or envious – although easy and regularly tempting – is actually not possible in a field that is so diverse and yet so specific. If you really invest in your own practice there is no time to worry about other people and their careers. Their success should have no impact on your own sense of self-worth.

Whatever you choose to do, make sure it’s the main thing you want to do every morning when you wake up. There has to be a real motivation to get out of bed early and work on something that isn’t necessarily going to ensure you a summer holiday. Being an artist is a super crazy gamble with your life, but if the need to identify yourself with the term artist is greater than the need for a secure pension you should follow it through at least for a while.

This year I thought a lot about expectation and how for artists the idea of ‘the future’ is such a motivating factor. I was quite critical of this for a long time, the potential disappointments and challenges that artists set themselves up for, but I’ve come to think that actually this ‘expectation’ is a very beautiful and emotional state. I find it much easier to warm to people when I sense they are ambitious, regardless of if that ambition is paying off.

RT: If you had only one sentence to provide an encouraging tip for new graduates what would it be?

OB: What do you want to do most in life, how does it relate to the context of contemporary issues of art and histories of art, why does it need to be shared with an audience? Work these small questions out and be persistent with your answers.

Oliver Braid is a visual artist living and working in Glasgow. He studied at Falmouth College of Arts and Glasgow School of Art. He has recently exhibited Love Made Easy at The Mutual, Glasgow, I’m 26 & I’ve Got Nothing at BBC Scotland, Glasgow and I’ll Look Forward To It at Collective, Edinburgh as part of their New Work Scotland Programme 2011. In 2012 he will present My Five New Friends, his first large scale solo exhibition, at The Royal Standard, Liverpool, a new short performance work at Tramway, Glasgow for their New Work Symposium and will be involved in two small projects for Glasgow International 2012.

www.oliverbraid.com »
www.oliverbraid.tumblr.com »

Richard Taylor, Oliver Braid

Richard is an artist/writer living in Edinburgh and online editor on behalf of a-n The Artists Information Company, for the Degrees unedited and Students community sites.

www.rich-taylor.co.uk

First published: a-n.co.uk January 2012