The Let's Talk Podcast

WHAT DOES A YES ACTUALLY COST? Take a fairly normal example. I've applied for an art-fair-style opportunity in London. Let's imagine I'm accepted. Brilliant. I've got my yes. Now I've got to get the work there.

This episode is going to be slightly different. It's less about one particular subject and more of a reflection on where I am at the moment. There's been quite a lot going on over the last few weeks.

Twenty open calls. Twenty applications since I started this experiment. So I thought this was probably a good point to stop, look at the spreadsheet, and ask: What am I actually learning?

I'm now two weeks into my three-week Artwave open house. So far, 134 people have come through my front door. I've got roughly 58 works on display. And 27 of them have sold.

Hi everybody, and welcome back to the Let's Talk Project podcast. I wasn't expecting to record another episode about my mental health quite this quickly. The last episode was called  What Happens to the Work When You're Not Okay?  At the end of it, I talked about being interested in what might happen to my work over the coming weeks and months.

Mental health, making, masking and what comes next Content warning:  This episode discusses mental-health crisis, suicidal thoughts, bereavement and traumatic events. Please decide whether this is something you want to listen to right now.

Pricing the work, pricing your time, and standing behind the number

Making the work that's actually yours

Six weeks in: what I'm spending, what I'm measuring, and what I'm beginning to see I’ve talked about open calls before on this podcast. But eventually I realised that rather than just having an opinion about them, I wanted some data. So I decided to run an experiment.

One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is attention. Because the art world—like most things now—runs on it. And once you notice that, it becomes difficult to ignore.

I recently bottom out on my current body of work… I’ve been thinking a lot recently about why we make work in the first place. Not professionally. Personally. Because I think a lot of people arrive at creativity through very different routes.

This episode is about Instagram. Because whether we like it or not, Instagram has become deeply tied into contemporary creative practice. And honestly, it comes up in every conversation I have with artists. People feeling invisible. Not being seen. Watching engagement collapse. Feeling pressure to constantly perform. And I think a lot of artists are quietly exhausted by it.

This episode is about rejection. Not just open call rejection, but rejection generally inside creative practice. Because if you make work long enough, rejection becomes unavoidable. And I think artists probably talk about it less honestly than they should.

A decision that changed how I look at work — and what I notice.

A more personal episode, looking at grief and how it shapes a creative practice. Not as a subject, but as something that changes how and why the work continues.

In this episode, I talk about what actually moves a practice forward — and why it’s rarely about chasing galleries or being seen. Instead, it comes back to building a consistent, cohesive body of work and staying with it long enough to understand where it’s going.

They've opened doors for generations of Artists, but the system has changed. Stemming from lots of conversations and even more open call entries, this episode is about starting conversations around open calls and how they've developed into an industry.