TIME-MONEY-MAGIC: public art for beginners by Jes Fernie

Hello. I understand you’re reading this because you’re interested in working on public commissions or socially-engaged projects. I’ve been working in this field for thirty years. Everything I say below is written from a personal viewpoint. There’s no doubt loads I’ve missed out and perhaps bits I’ve got wrong, and certainly things that other people would do differently, but it’s a start. It could all be summarised in the following four points: It’s really hard! It will all take at least twice as long as you think! You won’t be paid enough! It’s massively life-affirming if you manage to get it right!

Where to look for commissioning opportunities

Call-outs and announcements are scattered across multiple different portals (e.g. institutions, councils, funding bodies). There’s no net to catch them all but here are some to keep an eye on:

Artquest
AXIS
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VASW
Art Rabbit
Arts Jobs

It’s also worth keeping up to date with commissioning organisation activity, e.g. UP Projects, Artangel, Art on the Underground, Future City, Contemporary Art Society, Ginkgo, Pony Projects, Flock, 'a space’ arts, Cement Fields, Take a Part, Field Art Projects and Bricks. Some local authorities are particularly active in public art commissioning but it’s an extremely uneven playing field. Bristol, Westminster and Brighton are ones that are on my radar, and Southampton and Plymouth are currently embarking on new programmes. Many have public art policies, cultural strategies, place-making strategies or place visions. Universities, transport networks, and public realm organisations sometimes commission artists to make new work for their sites. Get to know your local ones. Keep an eye on social media channels of these organisations.

Get to know curators and people who work in commissioning organisations, follow their programmes, attend their events, get to know what interests them, what is current (UP Projects has a great programme of on-line talks). They don’t hold competitions or open-calls themselves, but they curate and produce public art commissioning programmes for other organisations, which includes drawing up long-lists of artists.

But.. by far the best way to start a career in this field is to create your own ecosystem – do something locally, develop a network, apply for funding and residencies, go to events, get your voice and practice known in the local arts infrastructure. As a recent graduate or early career artist you’re unlikely to have a large body of work to present in applications, and are unlikely to get high profile commissions. You need to develop a language or approach that curators and commissioners can identify and get excited by. This doesn’t necessarily have to be in the ‘public art’ world. Many artists make exhibitions, stand-alone work for gallery spaces, and are then invited to make public commissions.

Think about applying to artist’s development programmes. This is a great way of developing your practice, trying out new things, and creating a network of supportive practitioners. Syllabus, run by Wysing Arts Centre, is a particularly good one, but there are others – your local, publicly-funded gallery or artist-run space might also be a good start (Eastside Projects in Birmingham and Devonshire Collective in Eastbourne are always on my ‘excellent artist-support’ radar but there are loads more).

If you’re a recent graduate, it might be a bit early to get a mentor, but if you’re an early-career artist with a bit of experience under your belt, this might be useful for you. I mentor a lot of artists at all stages of their career – it can be a fantastic way of thinking through what your interests are, where you’re likely to get to, and how you present your practice. Many artists fund this work through an ACE DYCP grant, see Catherine Herbert’s resource for further information about this.

Tips for applications

Harriet Cooper’s resource list on this website is fantastic. I don’t want to repeat it here, but here are my pointers:

Read the brief carefully – consider whether this is really for you. Are you likely to be successful? Can you commit time and resources to this process? Does it excite you?

Is it a straightforward commissioning process involving an architect and developer or is this a socially-engaged project that requires you to enter a dialogue with local communities, or organisations? They are very different processes that require varying skills, levels of enthusiasm and interests.

Applications are time-consuming and sometimes soul-destroying, but they can also be opportunities for reflection and creative development. Weigh up whether the time, energy, thought and care you commit to an application is worthwhile. Can you feed the enthusiasm and ideas you have developed in this application to another body of work or methodological approach? I can feel, when I’m considering whether to apply for something, whether it excites me – I immediately start thinking about possibilities and approaches, and regardless of whether I’m successful, I feel it has helped me move on, clarify a position, or carry out valuable research. If a brief doesn’t enthuse you, it’s probably not one you should commit time to. The person who reads it will feel it too.

Answer each question with clarity and brevity. Many artists fall at this hurdle. The language of the visual arts is often opaque and wordy. Challenge yourself to write something that is clear, imaginative and succinct. Get someone else – who isn’t in the artworld - to read it over before submitting it.

Don’t promise too much! At this stage you are likely to know very little about the context, the people, the ambitions of the project. If an application process asks for a proposal (a process I wouldn’t necessarily support), don’t commit a huge amount of time to developing a detailed proposal; rather, present a possible approach, and make it clear that this is all up for discussion (with user-groups, community members, architects etc) if you are successful.

Your response to the brief, or proposal, should be explicitly aligned to the context of the commission. If it’s clear this is a proposal that has been lifted from elsewhere, or has no connection to local specificities, it is unlikely to be successful.

Do a lot of research – about the project, the building, the people, the user groups. Commissioners often want to see themselves reflected back at them in an application process – they aren’t so much interested in you and your work, but how your work could fit into their ambitions, contexts, designs.

Commissioning process - working with consultants/stakeholders/developers

Every discipline has its own language (and often, disturbingly, gender-bias); try to learn a bit of it and understand that developers, commissions and stakeholders want to feel that they are in a safe pair of hands. Try and give them that, along with a bit of magic.

Pick your battles! Of which there will probably be many. These are often budget-related, but also connected to schedule, contract and fabrication wranglings. Keep your eye on the final outcome. Don’t give in to something if you think it will seriously impact on the quality of the work.

If you are a sole-trader, or even working with the representation of a small gallery, don’t sign a contract that burdens you with the liability to realise a large-scale commission. This is the job of other, larger, contractors.

Find a fabricator who understands your practice and preferred way of working. This can be hard; you build up networks through a process of trial and error throughout your career. When you find someone, keep hold of them! If you’re working with a council, they will probably put in place a tender process to appoint a fabricator. Try to argue that they are likely to save time and money by appointing someone you have an established relationship with.

Think about how the work of other consultants on the team will affect how your work is viewed or experienced – e.g., lighting and public realm designers, water consultants, engineers. Where possible, make friends with them.

Be clear about what you can and can’t do, and when you are going to do things. Public art projects cannot do the work of architects, social workers, planners or designers.

Remember people’s names! I worked with an artist years back who made direct eye-contact with everyone on the project group during meetings and remembered all their names. It was impressive - seduction in action.

Community consultation/engagement

If you’re interested in socially-engaged projects, then ‘community consultation’ will take up the bulk of your work. Practice in this field is a fast-developing feast: it has moved fairly recently from participatory practice, to co-commissioning and co-production; recognising the skills, knowledge and ambition that is embedded within local communities.

Work with a curator, producer or community leader to ensure that you understand, and can cater for, specific needs that a marginalised or vulnerable community might have.

Be aware of the criticisms levelled against a number of arts organisations that have ‘used’ a community for short-term gain. Try and build in an imaginative, realistic legacy framework for your project that has meaning and worth for the people involved.

There’s a growing understanding that many socially-engaged art projects exist within unsustainable delivery models that rely on the labour of unpaid staff; unrealistic budgets (particularly for artists!); and a framework that places excessive strain on artists, curators, producers, freelancers and un-waged participants. This ‘burn-out’ approach often results in short-term projects where long-term commitment and a determination to establish a legacy become compromised and a community is let down. Be cognisant of all this and argue for a project management structure that includes opportunities for workloads to be discussed and re-appraised.

Leave space for the unexpected! Working with communities or local people often introduces a whole range of possibilities that you hadn’t entertained – that’s part of their magic. One of my favourite projects involved the discovery of a man living in a residential care-home who showed us hundreds of drawings he’d made of his life as a milk-man in south Bristol. We published them in a beautiful book – it was by far the most meaningful as well as useful element in a much larger commissioning programme.

For stand-alone, public commissions there is likely to be some need for community consultation and engagement, usually at the early stages of a project. This can be a cynical exercise carried out by a developer as a sop to a local authority to fulfil planning requirements, or it can be a meaningful, constructive process that helps you arrive at a proposal and a work of art that connects to a sense of place and / or community. Watch out for situations where you might feel that your proposal is being watered down to meet the needs or interests of a large number of people. Anodyne artworks are no friend to anyone.

Design development, inc. planning/structural

Ensure that you understand who is responsible for signing off your proposal. It is sometimes not just the group you present to, but another (higher order) that will have the final say. It can be disconcerting to find this out late in the process.

As much as you’d like to get involved in many aspects of a much larger project, it’s important that you use your time wisely and focus on your part of the project.

Design development often includes processes that are out of your hands (planning issues, agreements with other agencies etc). Try to let them go. I worked on a large-scale commission for Oxford Street that was installed, then immediately covered up for four years while the public realm and infrastructure was built up around it. It was insane. But I learnt to let it go. I began to think of the work having its own inner life, sheltered beneath the hoardings.

Challenges and advice on how to approach them

Your time! You’ll be one of the very few people around the table who is on a fixed fee rather than a wage. Permanent public commissions generally take much longer than planned. I have never worked on an architecture, urban or public realm scheme that has been delivered on time, to budget. Build this into your budget, time schedule and set of expectations. Consult current guidelines on rates of pay:

a-n
Artists’ Union England (includes Social Practice day rates)

I’m amazed by the number of briefs I read that ask artists (and curators) to deliver the world for a tiny budget in a very short timeframe. Don’t apply for an opportunity if it is compromising. This is a political act – we need to create systems of solidarity in the art world that support viable working conditions for all. As someone who has worked as a freelancer for nearly thirty years, I’m evangelical about this. I regularly ask for a higher fee or budget and refuse to work for institutions for free. Sometimes it works! And it’s heartening to see how embarrassed people are. But the important thing is that the point is made.

Many call-outs provide an overall budget that includes fees, materials, consultancy fees, installation, insurance etc. I find this problematic on many levels (would any other job combine salary with other costs?), but if you decide to continue, devise your own budget that separates your fee from other costs, and stick to it. Break it down into days. There may be opportunities for fund-raising that a commissioner has not thought of, or which arise later down the line.

Many organisations involved in commissioning programmes don’t have the skills and knowledge to deliver a commissioning programme. They often employ a freelance curator or commissioner to help them through the process. If they don’t have expertise, or insist that this is only required at the beginning of the process in order to appoint an artist, alarm bells should start to ring. As an early career practitioner, it is particularly important that you get this support. You need someone to fight your corner and to do a whole range of things that are outside your scope.

Once a project is complete, make it work for you. Use it to position yourself and your work within a world that interests you (the visual art infrastructure, the architecture / development world, education etc). Organise your own launch, if necessary. Often, with public commissions or socially-engaged projects, launches can be pulled in many different directions and organised by people whose focus is elsewhere (on the building or the public realm scheme). If this is the case, organise your own launch, write your own press release, invite key people you think would be interested in your work, or who you’d like to develop a relationship with. Use social media as a tool to achieve this.

Documentation

Public art commissions often fall outside the traditional visual art infrastructure which is supported by websites, exhibition archives and critical responses to the work. Document your process, insist that a professional photographer is commissioned to photograph the work, and present a pdf to the commissioner upon completion. I find that many people contact me about commissions I’ve worked on – even though I have long completed my involvement. My website is often the only public-facing resource about the work.

Maintenance and decommissioning

Often forgotten at the beginning of a commissioning process, it’s important to consider a life-span for your artwork and set out a realistic maintenance programme, with responsibilities built into contractual arrangements. Permanent works are often given a ten to twenty-year lifespan, after which a decision should be made about whether it is de-installed. Ideally, that decision would include you, but given the complicated ownership issues often related to public artworks (buildings and public spaces fall into new hands) this doesn’t always take place. Try to build a legal agreement concerning consultation with the artist, into your contract. This is one of the reasons you need curators / producers to support you!

Acknowledge and embrace the fact that all public artworks are ‘subject to change’ and brought alive by their relation to the public. See my Archive of Destruction for documentation of public artworks that have been destroyed by natural causes or by human action through fear, boredom, rage, entropy, greed and love.

Books

Here are some of my favourite books on public art / socially-engaged commissioning:

Made from this Land, making art and bricks in the Southend landscape, Emma Edmondson. Published by Emma Edmondson, 2024.

Art as Policies for Care – Socially Engaged Art, editors: Martina Angelotti, Matteo Lucchetti, Judith Wielander. Nero Editions, 2024.

Collectively Annotated Bibliography: On artistic Practices in the Expanded Field of Public art, editors: Judith Wielander and Matteo Lucchetti. Public Art Agency Sweden, 2018.

Mansions of the Future: A Public Programme, Ed: Kerry Campbell. Chateau International, 2021.

A City Curating Reader, editors: Joanna Warsza and Patricia Reed. Public Art Munich, 2018.

Public Enquiries, PARK LEK and the Scandinavian Social Turn, editors: Helena Selder, Somewhere, Mick Wilson and Giogiana Zachia, Black Dog Press, 2018.

Our Pink Depot, The Gay Underground FLO-N202-236000000-TRK-MST-00002-SAY-HELLO-WAVE-GOODBYE-KEN-NIE-BPS, Nina Wakeford. Bookworks, 2019.

Liberties of the Savoy, Ruth Ewan. Bookworks and CREATE London, 2012.

Education for Socially Engaged Art, A Materials and Techniques Handbook, Pablo Helguera. Jorge Pinto Books, 2011

Samra Mayanja, What do we mean by ‘communities’ and how do we engage with them?, Grizedale Arts, 2020. (Podcast)

Jes Fernie is an independent curator and writer with 25 years’ experience working with galleries, architectural practices, and public realm organisations on public programmes, commissioning schemes, exhibitions and residency projects across the UK and abroad. Working primarily in the public realm, Jes is interested in ways that artworks are viewed, positioned, and transformed by a live relationship with audiences, contexts and conditions.

This guide is commissioned in partnership by Arts University Bournemouth, Arts University Plymouth, University of the West of England and VASW.