Anna Rogers talk

Today we had a professional development talk by Anna, a past student here at CSAD, who was very reassuring in telling us how life as a freelancer artist is and how she’s still afraid of the uncertainty of being one, but also how that’s an okay feeling to have because we’re all on the same page. She also gave us a lot of advice, including what to apply for, such as the ABF and Venice Invigilator, which were things I was planning on applying for.

Anna told us to research into how to write workshop proposal if we were planning on being freelance artists because workshops are a huge deal for her to build her artist portfolio. As well as workshops, Anna does assistant-ing, exhibitions, and residencies, which are all just as important in building her career.

She also works for Women’s Aid charity which became very useful for her, and is something that sounded like an excellent path for me to take too, as I do a lot of my work based around women’s issues and topics and I care deeply about them.

Anna offered us some advice on what to do in freelance opportunities to secure that we don’t get conned for the work we’ve done for someone, such as asking who’s curating, if we need to pay for the instalment, and who is responsible for it and for when something goes wrong, paying for production time, materials cost, and to always ask for a contract because anyone could let you down.

We were also given advice on tax and what to do about it as a freelance artist. We won’t have to pay for tax if we earn under £10,000, but we will need to pay for national insurance, which is about £6 a month, according to Anna. We were also told to keep on top of everything like paying national insurance and keeping receipts for everything, such as for materials bought for shows because those costs can be deducted from the income, and to submit this record of receipts. She also let us know about the interest rate of 8% we are legally allowed to put on, depending on how long an organisation takes to pay you if we are having trouble getting paid, and to always put that reminder on the end of an invoice because this makes it more likely to get paid.