'Master of Some?' by Barry Sykes

[An audio version of this resource by Barry Sykes is coming soon.]

“Hi there,

Thank you so much for your interest in my work. Can I ask how you heard about me?

Everything I make is a bespoke commission, so the work starts with your ideas and we will develop it together.

Based on your source photos I think a seated pose would work best, as it will show off their shape and character nicely. Maybe a slight turn in the body as I find this really brings them to life.

When we're nearly done I'll send you some photos to check it is how you want. Then when you're happy I can custom pack it and ship directly to your door.

...”

I write a variation of this email most weeks. Some get a response. Most don’t.

I should explain. Ever since I graduated from my MA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art in 2000, now over a quarter of a century ago (gulp) the majority of my income has come from making life-sized sculptures of my customers’ pets or favourite animals out of layers of galvanised chicken wire mesh.

I am not writing this article to suggest you also support your work by making wire animal sculptures. I do not need the competition. But I am writing from the perspective of someone who has spent decades maintaining a rigorous conceptual, often absurd, art practice whilst spinning a number of rather different plates to do so. And as someone who took too long to realise the numerous benefits of not being able to live off your art.

The above email introduction is how I reply to any inquiries coming in via the chat box of my website animalsinwire.com. I go on to explain what I need from them (lots of photos, favourite poses and details, some measurement), the time scale (about a month, more if I’m busy), and of course an estimate of the cost in advance of all that information. As I say, most don’t reply. Maybe they’re just curious, or planning something for way in the future, or put off by the expense (little dogs like that Westie start at around £650 plus p&p). I have no way of knowing.

But the few that do respond positively will then go on to be booked in as confirmed orders and forward me a nice 50% deposit so I can start work.

This income is what then pays for my studio and other life overheads. Or doesn’t, and then things get tricky. A tougher climate for expensive, whimsical animal gifts in recent years is what has prompted me to think about all the other ways I can be useful, and profitable, which is what I want to write about here. And how the entire breadth of what we do for work can be seen as our personal resource - funding us but also teaching us.

For the past couple of years I have been writing ‘Barry’s Anywhere Art School’ at the top of invoices and project briefs for teaching, workshops, commissions and events. My non-animal based art practice (I think of the animals as the craft side of what I do, but that’s another debate) is much more human-focussed and non-wirey, with pencil drawings, clay sculptures, watercolours and various social strategies looking at the dynamics of interaction, connection and absence.

I had always enjoyed doing talks about my work, but never felt confident to offer my services, only responding if invited. The same for exhibiting work, or other projects. I used to think this was me finding out where I fitted best, but it was actually a useless mix of caution and a fear of rejection.

Then a few years after college I was offered a completely unrelated job – or so I thought. Being paid a very generous hourly rate to walk around huge corporate office blocks and check the serial numbers on the back of every monitor and computer. Much like the Apple TV programme Severance this was an airless, repetitive, mind-numbing experience. But what it taught me was the negotiating tactics to enter a room and ask each employee, from reception desk to Director’s office, to step away from their machine for a few minutes while I clambered under and over it looking for the right sequence of numbers.

I thought this was a willing step away from my practice, the complete opposite to my way of working, but I only realised later that it gave me what art school never had: a form of professional confidence, and an ability to step into other’s territory and take up space there; to communicate that there was a definite benefit from my presence, even if they didn’t understand it yet; and an understanding that the most useful things for your art work, and also funding for it, may come from outside what you see as your practice. And may be all the better for it. Over the years this increasing approach has taught me a number of valuable lessons, that I will try and list for you below:

One, It’s the Wild West out there.
You are reading this because the art world and all its benefits have not immediately and repeatedly fallen into your lap; therefore you, and I, need to find new ways to make it work, and that is completely natural, even inevitable, in such a poorly thought out, unstructured, unequal industry such as ours.

Two. Always be open.
We will then need to put work into inventing our own strategies to maintain a career in it. And the best way to do this is, ironically, to be open to things that are outside of it, but that still involve the themes or practices you have always been fascinated by. Maybe you start volunteering once a month at a charity, which then offers you a job, as well as introducing you to people who would love the work you’ve been making, and importantly, deepens your understanding and experience of the issues you’re making work about. Or maybe it’s more indirect than that, and the repetitive admin job informs your relentless, pattern-based drawing practice. Let’s face it, you will have to find that job to fund your practice. Just try to stay curious to all the ways it can inform your work, because…

Three. Small can be big.
You don’t need a lot of time to make work. I know endless days of studio pottering sounds dreamy, but chances are nobody gets as much time as they’d like to make work. When my practice has felt pushed to the side I’ve just made sure I did a little bit every week, even in a tiny notebook, or one email to someone, and then told someone about it, which I always felt gave it life.

Four. Learn to listen to yourself.
I felt like art school was all about making me a better critic of myself, narrowing down my decisions and actions to the most appropriate or interesting. But in doing so I wasn’t letting the little uncertain ideas or niggling obsessions grow into anything significant. When I’ve allowed myself to give time and focus to these without needing justification, just trusting they are there for a reason, they have often blossomed into the most wonderful projects that other people have found value in too. For example, letting Laughter Yoga, sauna culture or naturism into my practice. I could have easily talked myself out of it, but they have connected me to enthusiastic audiences within these cultures, and given me a complex, deep knowledge to share outside of it. Fundamentally, what do you enjoy, what fascinates you, or what troubles you. There is a reason for this.

Which leads to Five. You do you.
Two things in recent years highlighted to me the significance of the strange, meandering career path I have taken. The birth of my kids and my Autism diagnosis. When we had our first child it turned out that my sporadic work patterns and relentless improvisation were actually rather useful parenting tools, as if they finally made sense, or I had been given a license to appreciate them at last. And the process of autism diagnosis revealed to me that the choices I had made to get into the working life I was in were in part due to the social needs of my condition: A practice that was built around a space for solitude and intense focus, putting a value on the very particular ways I see the world, and with regular, heavily formatted, short term immersion in much more complex social settings, like collaborations, commissions and classes. The time lag between working like this and finding the reason behind it also reassured me that I must have some sort of instinct for what works best for me in the short and long term.

Six. Find your people.
It can seem like the individuals in your sector you need to make the effort to connect with are the power brokers above you, those who select the residencies, exhibition programmes and other opportunities. But the most likely to help you, and easier to approach, will be either people like you, at your level, or people from outside the arts who are interested in what you do. Both may be much keener to start working with you on a little project or to meet up and support each other. Once I had built up a few of these networks it was much easier to feel validated and to find ways to make things happen.

Seven. Represent yourself.
There are a few different stories of famous people who invented imaginary agents, so instead of approaching producers and casting directors themselves – which was frowned upon – they would hide behind a fake name and character, writing emails and making calls themselves but with a different accent or tone of voice, apparently on their behalf. My favourite example is the TV presenter Anneka Rice; who invented an assistant, ‘Clementine Hart’, to speak on her behalf for over a decade, mainly turning down work whilst she raised her children. Whilst wonderfully absurd, and an art project in itself, I love that it acknowledged how hard it can be to speak for yourself, but only a slight shift in mindset can make that seem simple and possible.

This relates to two points, firstly that it can only benefit you to remember that they need you as much as you need them; and secondly that the more you value yourself the more reassuring people find it. To put it bluntly, talk yourself up. This isn’t exaggerating or boasting about what you do, but neither is it revelling in the warm safety of coyness and modesty. That used to be my happy place too, but financial necessity and a creeping sense of inertia and disappointment led me to a need to put myself out there, to quantify my value to others. That means instead of shrivelling up every time someone asked me ‘what do you do?’ I decided to swap the meandering, abstract, improvised artist statement I used to give with a very quick, potted description of the project I was thinking about that week. Which immediately felt more constructive, impactful and generous. And with aspects of your work now being much more tangible to others, people’s responses are more useful too, or they latch on to an element of it and contact you months down the line with an opportunity. Then to increase the effectiveness of that you just need to increase the number of times you do it. So I make sure I override my natural reserve and find various new ways of finding the right people. Playing to my strengths and curiosities I know I enjoy structured, democratised, slightly absurd human interactions. For me that works in a number of purposeful ways. I joined a few local clubs in the things at the edges of my interests, in my case exercise and sewing. Conversations at these then flagged up some other free courses being run by our council to develop skills, then doing these made me more confident to seek out and manage new opportunities. In each of these settings I also ensured that I had talked about what I do. Another was rethinking what a business card for my practice could be, and regularly using that as an experimental space for introducing my ways of working, then enjoying handing these out to people I spoke to at events. That also meant that I had slightly gamified, or playfully reclaimed, these potentially intimidating interactions.

A business mentor I worked with briefly said all these actions were deposits, you were banking each connection you made, that seed was now in the ground and watered, you just couldn’t know when it would come to fruition. Having a sense that each of these gestures was now working away in the background, rather than being disappointed by the lack of immediate response, was all the encouragement I needed to keep making these regular gestures of self development.

Then we have Eight. Give it a name.
I often feel that an artwork I’ve made isn’t finished or hasn’t fully come to life until I’ve titled it. And this title needn’t just be a neat summation of the qualities of the work, it just needs to give it a sense of solidity and a reference to start a train of thought. And naming my various activities ‘Barry’s Anywhere Art School’ was no different. It could sweep up all the different social aspects of my practice into something tangible. The name is purposefully ephemeral, almost an admission that this is an imaginary organisation I have willed into existence, but also simultaneously a bolder claim that every situation or location has the potential to become a site for learning and creative rethinking. I find it much easier to present it to people, and let them imagine how it can be of use to them.

And once these opportunities arise we come to point Nine, Pricing.
I cannot recommend enough looking at the Artist Union England pay rates web page, where they set standard fees for artists with a range of experience levels. For example £216.63 a day for a graduate, £387.21 a day for a lead artist. Perhaps like me you were shocked with how high these amounts were when you first saw them, but all that really says is how little we have been valued before. I have also spoken to other professionals who say these are still half what you should be asking. I am not saying that you can expect this level of pay for each project, but what if we all agreed to make this our opening offer, and any subsequent negotiated reduction would be properly acknowledged on both sides? I have been pleasantly surprised on a number of occasions when organisations have actually accepted this rate without question. If you don’t ask, you don’t get.

And finally Ten. Everything is Everything.
Back when I started ‘Animals in Wire’, and was still hunting for serial numbers in a cheap suit and tie, I was anxious that these efforts were taking time away from my practice, and the mental gymnastics to keep them all separate was exhausting - and blinkered. I have done two things in recent years to improve this. Firstly, to still mark out the animal sculptures as separate from my art work (I call them the craft, as opposed to the art, and I mean no hierarchy between the two), but to think of it as a learning channel for my practice in pricing, networking, sales, commissions, conversation. I’m currently working with a business consultant to improve my ways of working and she was keen to consider all my earning channels together, as both strands can learn the same lessons at the same time.

Then secondly, to consider other earning channels that are closer to my artwork as all part of the practice. Looking back through my ‘Barry’s Anywhere Art School’ invoices and income for the past couple of years this work has included a kids party, featuring elaborate drawing games; a weekly improvised drawing club; a long term series of making workshops with young autistic people from a local primary school; designing and making a series of sculptural trophies for a nationwide competition; a series of tactile creativity workshops with Stroke patients in a local hospital; a day of drawing with theatre students at the Guildhall School of music and Drama; an event devised for a 50^th birthday party that is becoming a pair of books; and a laughter yoga class in an ornamental garden. All of which generated good money, and then funded more self-set work, as well as my other financial commitments.

So what I’m saying is… follow your enthusiasms, care a bit less about where they take you, embrace the various ways you can monetise it, hold your nerve when negotiating, and try and try to think of it all as part of the creative act. Also, feel free to only cherry pick what makes sense to you out of what I’ve suggested above. Fundamentally, all I’m saying is that I have invented my own way of working, and as an artist I’m sure you are well equipped to be able to do so too.

Best of luck!

Barry Sykes (born 1976, Essex, lives and works in Walthamstow, London) makes drawings, sculptures and events that unpick our relationships to pleasure, value and participation. Using instinctive, imprecise, often absurd methods, he devises games, processes and lesson plans that ask us to reflect on how we interact and understand ourselves. Often working at the edges of value, skill and acceptable behaviour, recent activity has looked at how we channel these concerns through our bodies, in experiments with laughter, stillness, exercise and relaxation.

Often acting as a host, guide or teacher, recent projects in 2024/5 have been developed for various organisations including Roger Ascham Primary School, London; Focal Point Gallery, Southend; Goldsmith's College, London and The Together Space disability charity.

This guide is commissioned in partnership by Arts University Bournemouth, Arts University Plymouth, Falmouth University and VASW.