Managing a portfolio

In the past few years, opportunities for artists to take their skills out of the studio, theatre or concert hall have expanded dramatically. Schemes like Creative Partnerships have taken a huge number of artists into schools, changing the educational experience of a generation of children but also developing the skills of a generation of artists. At the same time, opportunities have also opened up in business, in community settings, in regeneration projects, in prisons and in hospitals. Despite the proliferation of this sort of work, there are still very few artists who can make a living by working in just one of these settings, and yet the chance to transfer skills from one field to another is sometimes hard to come by.

At the moment, the only thing that is required of anyone wanting to undertake arts project work in most of the settings I’ve listed is a Criminal Records Bureau check. Certainly in the health sector there is no accreditation that extends to artists. There are, though, distinct skills and techniques that artists require to work in these settings. And these skills improve with experience. However, the way things currently work, an artist with 20 years’ experience of working in community settings has no means of translating this experience into greater employability (or into more money). Artists working in these settings have no means to share their experiences, little in the way of critical appraisal and no acknowledged ladder of development or of opportunity.

Assessing merits

Speaking as someone whose experience of being in a school stopped when I left the Sixth Form, I am not in a position to evaluate an artist’s work as part of Creative Partnerships, but I am sure that an artist who has successfully taken work into schools would be well placed to do the same for a hospital. The difficulty is I have no real way of telling. I don’t have the contacts in the education sector to build connections or the knowledge to truly differentiate different projects. Yet if I want to take advantage of the pool of artists with their recently developed skills (and they want to take advantage of the growing number of opportunities in the health sector) then I need to find some way of assessing their merits.
In the field of health, there is much that arts practitioners can learn from the experience of arts therapists who have, over the past few decades, fought a battle for acknowledgement within the NHS. Now firmly established as a regulated health profession, arts therapy (which includes music therapy and drama therapy) is a form of therapy that uses art to help clients communicate. Occasionally the practice of arts in health is confused with arts therapy and, while there is some cross-over, these are different disciplines, not least in the fact that art therapists are required to qualify (with a two-year postgraduate diploma) and must be registered with the Health Professions Council.

However, artists and arts therapists do work from the same starting point – a belief that the arts can and do have a role to play in health and that the establishment of a culture which engages with the arts will be a step to a better healing environment for all patients. Arts therapists have constructed a space for themselves within the NHS that is definitive and clear, and artists need to do the same. This doesn’t necessarily mean building the same sort of space but does mean clarifying the role of arts in health practitioners. This definition will help artists relate to the rest of the NHS and to relate to those employing artists outside the NHS.

Crediting experience

One of the key things that artists bring to their work in healthcare settings is an external perspective, which could be lost by forcing them to undergo extensive training and accreditation processes. I want more artists to move freely between health projects and work in schools or regeneration. However, the arts in health sector, along with other arts practitioners, needs to find a means of harnessing and crediting experience so that it works for employers and for artists.

At the same time, while there are sector-based bodies (like London Arts in Health Forum) many artists lack the support of a professional association: should things go wrong, they are on their own. A debate needs to begin about how artists building portfolio careers can be supported so that they are stretched and supported, their skills shared and developed. Most of all though, an environment should be encouraged where artists can build a range of experiences to influence their process and develop their practice.