Still, I don’t think the possibility of a future legacy should place more pressure on what we make now. I personally find something reassuring in how unstable recognition can be. You can make nearly anything, and if you stick it out long enough, someone might eventually explain why you were clever. The important part, then becomes, someone else saying so.

The difficult part is sticking it out, that is the money maker here. You must push through, until someone says so. 

I think about this quietly nihilistic feeling of mine, and I apply it in Brisbane, where artists build practices, find collaborators and make work within communities that often have very little to give financially, but give anyway. I feel like a broken record: we attend each other’s exhibitions. We publish each other. We lend equipment, share opportunities and help carry things up stairs. Artist circles and artist-run initiatives hold so much of this together.

As careers gather momentum, these artists leave.

There are understandable reasons: work, representation, money, family, a wider audience. The “moving to Melbourne” rhetoric is familiar enough to feel like a prescribed career step. Eventually, if you are serious about your work, you are expected to take it somewhere else.

Brisbane becomes the beginning of the biography. The place an artist came from. We reach after their success, claiming a connection to work we could not provide the conditions to sustain.

Artists leave. This is undeniable. What concerns me is how readily we accept departure as the natural progression of an arts career here. How easily we celebrate the resilience of early career creatives without asking why so much resilience is required.

We desperately need arts funding and support that make a continuing practice possible: affordable spaces, paid opportunities, sustainable artist-run initiatives and pathways beyond being perpetually emerging, very hungry little caterpillars in perpetuity. The people building these communities need enough support to imagine their own futures within them.

Recognition may arrive retroactively. Funding needs to arrive while the work is being made. 

I want Brisbane to be the tender fields. A place where artists can experiment, establish themselves and grow older. Where the communities that sustain the early work can share in what follows.

We already know how to begin things here, driven by that indomitable need to be understood. We need the funding, the infrastructure and the commitment to become a place to stay.

(Yes. This was spurred by someone who held up a gallery corner of the quilt moving to Prague. Come back.)