Temporary arts contracts have made a reluctant nomad of me, and that's VERY interesting
By Lauren Velvick
I didn’t set out to live in every combined authority area in the North of England, it’s just what happens when you live from temporary contract to temporary contract at arts institutions. Not an intentional lifestyle, but one that I’ve chosen to the extent that it is now habit, and I haven’t found a way out of it. I’m writing about it here because it’s my turn to contribute to Corridor8’s substack, and this reluctant nomadism is part and parcel with my status as an artworker. I did have a permanent role once, in Liverpool between 2016 and 2018, but it paid just about a living wage. So I applied for other jobs, and took one in Hull. Eventually that organisation made both me and the woman whose maternity cover I’d been working redundant, along with many of the rest of their staff. If not for that I might have stayed on in a job share with her. I set off again and lodged for a time in a seventeenth-century farmhouse in rural Lancashire, which sat amidst fields slowly being reclaimed by marsh and moss was accessible only via a mile-long country road that was often ankle deep in manure runoff. Then I moved into a bedsit by the river in my hometown of Preston and started another contract in Lancaster, on the day that lockdown landed in 2020. Throughout that lockdown I had to participate in teams meetings where we would be asked to ‘share how we really feel’. One colleague eventually cracked and shouted ‘I don’t get paid enough and I’m fucking sick of it all’. After around eighteen months it became clear that I would need to find another job, again, and eventually I accepted one in Huddersfield. At this point my salary also jumped up by something like 40% after increasing little by little over the years; the new salary was the sort of money that occasionally goes viral online as an insultingly low salary for a middle class cultural professional. When I was arranging a new flat to move into, I had to get a guarantor who earned the same or more, and realised that there was only one person in my family who fit the bill. A salary which is insultingly low but still more than that of almost everyone you know: one of those contradictions that informs my ambivalence towards my career and associated lifestyle.
