The Year I (Almost) Became a ‘Proper’ Artist (and Then Didn’t)

Why 2024 was a year of exhibitions, creative risks and hard lessons in the art world.

At the beginning of 2024, I had an idea of who I was—or at least, who I yearned to be. A visual artist, capital letters, the real deal. I’d spent the previous few years steadily building towards something that felt like a serious art practice, one that involved exhibitions, applications for funding, and the distant, glittering possibility of some kind of recognition. Not necessarily commercial success (the UK’s fine art world isn’t exactly queuing up to make female midlife artists rich), but something meaningful. A career, a place, the kind of credibility that people can’t just dismiss as a quirky little hobby.

In 2024, I finally had the chance to really embrace my ambitions. Important foundations were in place; I had a part time job that provided a steady income, my son had left school (no more school runs! The greatest joy!) and my husband’s chronic health problems were being held at bay by a wonderful new medication. I launched into the year with enthusiasm and post menopausal energy.

My first - heavily crazy ambition - was to apply to the Tracy Emin Foundation Residency program. This is a hugely prestigious and competitive residency - not least because it’s fully funded which is a miracle in a world of £30K MA courses. I didn’t feel remotely ready to apply but I thought, ‘how can it hurt’?

Through an administration accident, I also ended up organising two solo exhibitions for myself. These exhibitions became polar opposites, reflecting – in one sense - my ongoing struggle with artistic identity and in another sense the fact that galleries are truly idiosyncratic spaces to work with. It ended up feeling that I had two completely different artists trapped inside me, arguing about who got to define my “artistic identity.”

Daddy Was a Strong Man: A Week in Margate with My Own Ghosts

For my first exhibition, I decided not to censor myself. I wanted to create something that felt entirely instinctive, something that poured out of me unfiltered. The result was Daddy Was a Strong Man, a collection of ink drawings and text-based pieces forming a kind of fictionalised family history—part autobiography, part myth-making, part dreamscape. I took fragments of real family stories, twisted them through a lens of imagination, and layered them with ink, letting the imagery emerge like half-forgotten memories. The phrase from The Way We Were—“misty watercolour memories”—kept looping in my head as I worked, and the drawings became just that: misty, delicate, slightly out of reach. The whole point was their unreliability, their blurred edges reflecting the way we rewrite our pasts to suit the identities we construct for ourselves.

I was deeply invested in the work, and by the time I finished, I loved it. However I quickly discovered a huge problem in today’s Instagram dominated art world? My work was nearly impossible to photograph. The subtle, ghostly quality I had painstakingly cultivated refused to translate into the digital images required for promotion. Also, the entire collection leaned heavily into a pink palette, which I had chosen carefully. Pink is a wonderfully provocative and divisive colour with a history of being both saccharine and rebellious. Although I loved the final space dominated by huge washes of pink, I could see this would be challenging to the casual gallery visitor.

What really mattered was that, once the work was finished, I had to shift from artist mode to marketing mode—something I was hopeless at when it came to my own work.

My day job in marketing has taught me how to promote things ruthlessly, but when it’s my own art, that skill vanishes. Promoting a garden centre’s plant sale? No problem. Shouting about my own ink-stained, deeply personal explorations of memory and identity? Cue existential crisis. So, I did nothing. No social media posts, no outreach, no effort to actually get people through the doors. And then came the week itself: a blisteringly hot July in Margate, in a space I had mistakenly assumed would have some natural footfall. The actual location? A tiny, hidden room in an art centre just off the high street, tucked down an alleyway where no one ever ventured. I sat there for an entire week in near-total solitude, staring at my work in a state of weird dissociation. The sparse visitors included a group of local firefighters doing community safety checks, who—bless them—spent an awkward ten minutes asking me polite questions about my unintelligible ink drawings while clearly wishing they were anywhere else.

The irony was that, from a purely artistic perspective, having a week to sit in that room alone with my work was valuable. I could see what worked, what didn’t. I could absorb the pieces in a way I never could at home, where my “studio” was essentially the kitchen table. But the experience of sitting there in silence, waiting for an audience that never arrived, was also a stark reminder that making the work is only half the battle. You have to be willing to send it out into the world. And I wasn’t. At least, not yet.

The Night Garden; Flowers, Yellow Walls, and the Art of (Not) Selling

After Daddy Was a Strong Man, I did what many artists do when faced with a bruising creative experience: I reacted against it. I went from misty, ephemeral ink drawings on paper to thick, vividly coloured acrylic paintings on canvas. The gallery space for this show—located in a small but established commercial gallery in a busy café —had bright yellow walls, an unusual choice for a gallery, but one I found oddly appealing. Instead of fighting against it, I leaned in. I painted flowers. Luminous abstracted blooms with layered, intense colours designed to vibrate against the yellow. Each painting took far longer than I expected, requiring weeks of layering and reworking, but I liked the richness I was able to achieve.

Margate Pink….

In many ways, this work felt like the opposite of my Margate show. It was vibrant, immediate, and, all fingers and toes crossed, saleable. My dog had needed an eye-wateringly expensive operation that summer, and I vaguely imagined that these luxurious, decorative paintings might actually, you know, sell. Not least because the gallery space that had a steady stream of people passing through. And they were seen. The café was packed every day, with diners peering in through the gallery’s open doors, taking in the paintings over their cappuccinos. But engaging with a painting while eating brunch and actually buying one are two very different things. Didn’t sell a sausage.

Ironically, the only person who had purchased anything from me that year was one of the four actual visitors to my Margate show—someone who had wandered in off the street, connected with my pink ink ghosts, and taken two of them home. I should have found that poetic. Instead, I mostly found it exasperating.

At this point, it was October. I had spent the past ten months in a state of relentless creative output—painting, drawing, applying for the Tracey Emin residency, juggling my job, and trying to keep my own artistic momentum going. I was exhausted. And then, right in the middle of The Night Garden exhibition, on the same day I had a blazing argument with my mother, I checked my email and saw the rejection letter from the Tracey Emin Residency. My heart dropped. Although unsurprised, for a solid hour, I was gutted. And then, something unexpected happened.

I started to feel lighter.

Because what I realised, almost instantly, was that I had spent an entire year shaping my creative life around what I thought someone like Tracey Emin might want. And, deep down, I had always known I was never going to be that kind of artist.

I wanted to be fully immersed in the fine art world. I really did. I applied for the residency—as a way of legitimising myself, in proving that I belonged. And when I didn’t get it (as, let’s be honest, was always the most likely outcome), something cracked open inside me.

And what spilled out was… relief. A deep, unexpected, glorious sense of bloody relief.

I had spent so much of the year wrestling with my place in that world. The fine art world—at least the part of it I was trying to exist in—is built on a particular kind of currency. There’s money, obviously, but more than that, there’s status. Reputation. A deeply ingrained hierarchy where success isn’t just about making great work, but about playing the game—networking, positioning, saying the right things, knowing the right people. As an Autistic woman, I’m not sure I’m even capable of playing that game, let alone wanting it.

Freed from the weight of that expectation, something surprising happened.

I started writing poetry.

Not in some dramatic, throw-my-paintbrushes-into-the-sea kind of way. But casually, almost accidentally. I had taken a weekend writing retreat, as a break from painting, a way to escape the exhaustion of creating visual work for a few days. And when I sat down to write, what came out wasn’t prose or reflective journaling—it was poetry. And then another poem. And another. And another.

Something inside me lit up.

Because while I had spent the past year agonising over what kind of visual artist I was, my poetry just existed. Whereas I struggled constantly trying to work out what kind of artist I am, I have never needed to ask that question about my poetry. I know exactly who I am as a poet, what I’m writing about and why. This doesn’t mean all my poems are successful – far from it – but I know where I’m going, the ground feels firm underfoot.

And as I started dipping my toes into the poetry community, something became staggeringly obvious:

Poets are a different breed.

The fine art world can be so brutal. Even if you’re creating radical, disruptive work, there’s still a structure that determines who gets through the doors and who doesn’t.

Poetry, on the other hand? Nobody’s getting rich off poetry.

And because there’s no money (or at least, so little that it’s laughable), there’s less bullshit. Poets aren’t protecting some fragile ecosystem of wealth and influence. They aren’t trying to keep others out for fear of diluting the market, because there is no market. Instead, what I found was a gloriously ragtag community of people (some successfully published) who were just… writing. Workshopping. Reading. Existing. No one cared if I’d been published in a major journal. No one asked about my credentials. I signed up for a couple of Zoom workshops, and just like that, I was in. It was that simple.

And maybe this is what I’ve been craving all along. Not recognition as much as connection. Not an audience of collectors and critics, but a group of peers who simply loved the thing itself.

So here I am, enjoying this new creative year, feeling clearer than I have in a long time. I’m not giving up on visual art—I still love to paint- but I’m letting go of the need to force it into something rigid and marketable, that fits within a framework never designed for someone like me.

Instead, I’m following the pull of poetry, seeing where it takes me. And already, I feel lighter. I don’t know where this year will lead. But for the first time in a long time, I’m okay with that.

(And if, by some miracle, someone does find a way to make poetry financially viable—please, let me know...)