Abstract
How does the precarity of creative work iterate with the precarity of creative spaces? In answer, we examine Covid-19 pandemic experiences of workers across diverse creative sectors in Sydney, Australia, drawing upon qualitative mapping research. Our findings highlight divergent experiences of precarity before and during the pandemic: many suffered, others adapted, some even thrived, depending upon the nature of their work, access to socialisation and networking opportunities, plus whether livelihood precariousness was worsened and overlaid with additional geographic factors, including venue loss, tenure vulnerability, housing insecurity, and access to production spaces. Using conceptual insights from labour and feminist geography, we argue that for the creative sectors to flourish and support diverse, well-remunerated and satisfying work, there must also be discussions of the post-pandemic geography of creative work. Space and social relations within and beyond the work sphere are co-constitutive of precarity.
Introduction
Cultural and creative workers were among those hardest hit by the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic. Lockdowns and venue restrictions shocked performance-based sectors and those reliant on face-to-face interactions. In Australia, from where we report, the conservative federal government presiding over pandemic management not only downplayed the perceived societal value of the arts and culture but, through policy design, effectively punished sectors perceived to be antagonistic to its interests (including universities and the creative arts) (Banks and O’Connor, 2021). Meanwhile, Australia's urban housing crisis worsened. Renter evictions escalated amidst skyrocketing real estate prices fuelled by investor tax breaks and record low interest rates (Pawson et al., 2021). Property market dynamics both before and during the pandemic profoundly affected creative workers, and the precarity of their work (Gibson et al., 2023). The pandemic highlighted not just the precarity of creative work, but also the precarious conditions of urban life in general.
This article contributes a geographical perspective to knowledge of creative worker precarity, through tracing pandemic lived experiences. 1 Thinking geographically means attending to space and place and how they shape divergent experiences of precarity related to creative work (Gibson, 2003). Dimensions that are of a geographical nature include livelihoods and opportunities to perform, capacities to rescale networks, venue loss, housing and tenure insecurity, and the precarity of spaces for rehearsal and production. Factors amplifying precariousness have been the locational vulnerabilities for creative workers dependent upon low-cost and often informal creative space, venue closure, housing affordability problems, and worsening socio-spatial polarisation.
Attentive to such factors, and drawing upon conceptual insights from labour and feminist geographers (Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2023; Strauss, 2020), we advocate for analyses of precarity as co-constituted and experienced differently through matters of employment conditions, urban built environment, and social reproduction, within a wider geographic frame. Our understanding of the factors driving precariousness of creative work must be spatialised, encompassing wider socio-spatial inequalities, pressures in the domestic realm, precarity of housing tenure, and the viability and vulnerability of the diverse network of spaces necessary to perform work across the city. While there are many lessons from the pandemic encompassing mental health, arts policy support, and existential questions of the role of ‘culture’ in society (Banks and O’Connor, 2021; Brunt and Nelligan, 2021), our contention is that if the creative sectors are to flourish, supporting diverse, well-remunerated and satisfying work, there must also be discussions of the precarious post-pandemic geography of creative work.
To illustrate, we draw upon qualitative mapping research documenting creative workers’ pandemic experiences in Sydney, Australia, and how these intersect with the city's shifting geography. To an international conversation around creative worker precarity, we foreground geographical factors, emphasising their co-constitution with livelihood and employment conditions. Below, we review literatures on precarity in the context of creative work and outline conceptual influences from labour and feminist geographies. We do so towards charting the distinctive geographies of creative work. We then outline methods, before documenting results around key themes: financial precarity; network vulnerability; precarious home spaces; and access to and affordances of spaces of creative production. Our discussion then turns to ongoing post-pandemic precarity before we conclude on the profound-yet-uneven impacts of the pandemic on creative work, and the viability of creative lives and livelihoods amidst widespread conditions of urban precarity.
Conceptualising precarious creative work and spaces
Precarious creative work
Precariousness describes the increasing number of workers engaged in casual, temporary, contracted, insecure, illegal, discontinuous, or irregular forms of work (Gill and Pratt, 2008; Morgan and Nelligan, 2018; Ross, 2009). Poor wages and job insecurity typify working lives within post-Fordist, flexible, knowledge-driven modes of capitalism, and amidst digitisation and the shift toward disruptive platformisation of work – the so-called ‘gig economy’ (Wells et al., 2021).
Creative workers especially ‘symbolise contemporary transformations of work’ (Gill and Pratt, 2008: 2), purportedly becoming free agents in determining their own working schedules and corresponding lifestyle (while still constrained by class, gender, and precarity; Morgan and Nelligan, 2018). Critical scholarship has nevertheless exposed growing inequalities unleashed by precarity, and the insidious discourse of ‘flexibility’ (Gill and Pratt, 2008). Freedom and flexibility have fuelled the ‘utopianisation’ of cultural work (Banks, 2009: 668) – a façade for the increasingly tenuous conditions of life in advanced capitalism. Lived experiences of this vary widely. Those marginalised or excluded from economic opportunities face amplified precarity in the creative sector. For Pacella et al. (2021: 46), ‘the frequently informal, network-based and otherwise precarious work practices underpinning much employment in the arts and creative industries are effectively operating as a barrier to gender, ethnic, class and wider social inclusion’.
Geographies of precarious work
To such critiques, we add insights via a geographic lens. As we show, precariousness is experienced divergently as both a condition of insecure employment and remuneration, and as a socio-spatial relation: emanating from and iterating with geography. Central to this perspective is the assertion that all forms of work are shaped by, and in turn shape, geographic space (Wells et al., 2021). Geography matters much more than as a mere backdrop for the unfurling dramas of employment precarity and struggles between capital and labour. Geography is a constitutive domain intermediating and influencing those dramas (Massey, 1984). The to-and-fro of creative work (and accompanying conditions of precarity) is not restricted to the employment contract or paycheck. Instead, work must be theorised in relation to what influential geographer Doreen Massey (2005: 179) described as a complex ‘power geometry’ – a geography of multiple power relations that extend both within and beyond multiple sites of work, connecting families, households, and communities, with the tangible spaces of home and work (Mezzadri, 2021). This approach, we argue, is essential for fully theorising creative worker precarity.
Labour geographies
Supporting our argument are conceptual influences from two sub-strands of geography: labour geography and feminist geography. Labour geography spotlights worker experiences of and responses to structural change in geographic space (Herod, 2001). A core theme is understanding workers’ capacities to shape the capitalist space economy, amidst constrained agency within bigger structures (Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2023). Telecommuting, working from home (WFH), subcontracting, platformisation, and globalisation are all geographical phenomena reconfiguring the conditional experiences of work (Cockayne, 2021; Wells et al., 2021). The pandemic further disrupted and intensified these dynamic worker geographies. It did so unevenly, and with profound consequences (Orman et al., 2023). Influenced by a labour geography perspective, we focus accordingly on the lived experience of creative workers under such changing structural conditions, and during the pandemic, including their divergent capacities to respond to crisis.
Meanwhile, creative work has its own distinctive geographies. Across academic and policy realms, it is now axiomatic that creative industries cluster in inner-urban locations with requisite infrastructure, audiences, knowledge sharing and cultural ‘buzz’ (Pratt, 2011), although numerous scholars have documented diverse forms of creative work in non-metropolitan and remote contexts (Gibson, 2012; Luckman, 2012). Less obvious, but no less important to the actual functioning of creative industries (and to the day-to-day experience of creative work), is that creativity also links dispersed spaces of composition, production, rehearsal, performance, and distribution (Brennan-Horley, 2010; Pratt, 2004). Creative work is processual, unfolding within fixed sites and through spatial flows: tasks, spaces, and movements in and across geography (cf. Felton et al., 2010; Gibson et al., 2023; Luckman, 2013). A musician, for example, might write and practise at home, rehearse in a practice studio, record in another studio with high-end gear and acoustic properties, perform at festivals and venues, release product via streaming services and bricks-and-mortar shops, and network across these spaces and in other sites such as guitar shops, which are also sites of supply and repair. Tasks that constitute that musician's work are diffuse, enmeshed in intricate webs of relationships across the city or wider network.
In the context of significant disruptions such as the pandemic, precarity among creative workers therefore needs to be considered as a divergent condition shaped by labour and livelihood concerns and disruptions to the geography of creative work. Creative worker precarity during Covid-19 was compounded by the already-existing multiplicity, fragility, and plasticity of the spaces of creative work (Brennan-Horley, 2010). In drawing together an interpretation of this sort, we thus contribute to an evolving body of work on creative spaces, their qualities, adaptations, and challenges (Ang et al., 2018; Martin and Grodach, 2023; Pratt, 2004). Rather than viewing such spaces in isolation, we consider them within networks of people, tasks, and sites, that together comprise creative work.
Feminist geographies
Also supporting our argument are insights from feminist geographers, who advocate for research examining the exploitation of women and feminised work, the centrality of ‘life's work’ beyond the neatly bounded workplace, and diverse activities that constitute work outside formal waged employment (Mitchell et al., 2004; Strauss, 2020; Strauss and Xu, 2022). Feminist geographers recognise the messy interdependence and intimate links between ‘work’ across formal spaces of economic production and ‘everyday life’ in home spaces of (gendered) social reproduction (McDowell, 2014; Orman et al., 2023). Feminist geographers have also demonstrated how pandemic upheavals ‘are embedded in social reproduction, with particular emphasis on the precarity of labor and contested household dynamics’ (Oberhauser, 2023: 225; see also Aldossari and Chaudry, 2021). Creative work illustrates the need for a feminist lens that challenges binaries of amateur/professional, home/work, central/remote, and paid/unpaid (Luckman, 2013). Anyone familiar with creative work will know the challenges of precarious contracts and multiple jobs while juggling complex life circumstances. That juggle is both social and spatial: unfurling across and within heterogeneous urban spaces. How pandemic conditions mediated this mix of precarious labour conditions and precarious geographical factors – and the degree to which workers’ capacities to adapt varied – was an open empirical question on which we report below.
Methods
This article draws on in-depth qualitative interviews with creative workers, documenting their pandemic experience, and impacts upon working lives, livelihoods, and geographies. 2 Building upon antecedent methods developed by the authors over a decade prior (Brennan-Horley and Gibson, 2009), accompanying the interview process was a qualitative mapping exercise, in which participants recorded their everyday spaces of creative work and activity, including spaces of composition and production, rehearsal, performance, and supplies procurement (including equipment, support services and repairs). Participants were asked to record their creative geography before and during pandemic conditions, including periods of time in lockdown, and in various post-lockdown situations (where, for example, venues were open but with limits on numbers of patrons). The maps served to ground the interviews in place – documenting geographies of lived experiences of creative work – while generating and enriching discussions.
The analysis below draws upon 21 interviews covering music (rock, country, jazz, and opera), visual art, architecture, theatre, drag performance, music booking, and management of a prominent collective creative/maker space. While the sample upon which this article is based is neither exhaustive nor complete (representativeness is not statistically possible for qualitative research of this sort, given the city's 200,000-strong creative workforce), sufficient interviews were secured through snowballing to reach ‘saturation point’ on themes: most prominently the precariousness of both creative workers’ livelihoods and spaces of work. Clear identification of this from midway through the empirical work prompted the authors to consolidate findings here.
Divergent experiences of precarity in Sydney, Australia
Conferring with previous studies (Gill and Pratt, 2008; Morgan and Nelligan, 2018), livelihood issues resonated among interviewees. Pre-pandemic financial inequalities were exacerbated for some and lurked in the background for others – even those well supported during this time. Divergences underscore the range of creative work and challenge generalisations (cf. Luckman, 2012). Where workers sat on spectrums of amateur-professional, paid-unpaid, and social reproduction-production – and in which sector – determined access to Covid wage subsidy schemes and other grants. Livelihood breakdowns ruptured creative networks (worsened by other pandemic impacts), underscoring the critical importance of socialisation and community-building.
Background and foreground financial precarity
For many, pre-Covid financial challenges were exacerbated during pandemic restrictions. The crucial yet inconsistent dynamics of federal pandemic income payments (called JobKeeper) and unemployment benefits (JobSeeker) also reshaped livelihood precarity. Some sole traders or those with secure contracts (e.g. those employed by major arts institutions) received the larger JobKeeper payments, while those reliant on intermittent or casual contracts – musicians especially – received smaller or no JobSeeker payments. For those receiving income support, a rare phase of livelihood stability enabled upskilling and re-evaluation, although set against precarity as a lurking threat. Fortuitous art commissions supported livelihoods over periods without other work; visual artist Nina* 3 used existing grants and commissions to ‘spread … financials over that time’. Conditioned to expect fluctuating finances, artists described persistent uncertainty and requirements to adapt through practices of ‘creative frugality’ (Gibson and Gordon, 2018), and the necessity of ‘day jobs’ was reiterated (Throsby and Hollister, 2003). For visual artist Eloise*, the pandemic ‘feels just like another thing’ to which artists must adapt.
Although paid work was still possible for some, precarity remained ever-present, managed through overwork, pivoting, and careful financial management. As pandemic uncertainty grew, an unforeseen boom in film and television work was pounced upon. Many in that sector – and those able to pivot into it – were busier than ever. H ran a prominent inner-city arts studio complex, a base for set production and other film industry work. They described the underlying anxiety for many despite abundance of work, including concern over potential future crises: American content companies [were] throwing millions of dollars around…. We couldn’t get crew…. People made a lot of money, but are absolutely burnt out…. Subsequently we’re about to go into a recession…. We got away with Covid [but] there's a level of anxiety there that is never ending.
For some, wage support schemes and sector-specific grants provided the ability to devote time to caring responsibilities and mental health – illustrating how creative working lives are enmeshed in matters of social reproduction (cf. Mitchell et al., 2004). For Nina, ‘it was definitely the most well-supported time, financially, for me, because I had access to the JobKeeper subsidy, so I had a regular income.’ Both Nina and musician Laura had family care responsibilities and deaths in their families during Covid. Creative work was for Laura sometimes the last thing she wanted to do: There was this whole attitude [of] ‘now is the time to get really creative … in lockdown’…. No, actually it's really fucked right now and I’m finding it really hard to be able to make sense of what's going on around me just even from the pandemic let alone all the other stuff. I emerged looking so much better than when I went in…. Because I was working a lot … I hadn’t had a break to sit there and be like, ‘Oh, I need to get better at certain things’…. Lockdown gave me that break.
As the character of creative work changed, musician Ben P expressed the necessity of building different skills: ‘It was somewhat a survival thing, because I just had to do it for teaching and for producing records for other[s].’ The many examples of upskilling and successful creative production illustrate how more sustained centralised financial support alleviates precarity. More considered creative production also challenged the normalisation of overwork; illustrated by Oli's shift from ‘working everywhere for five minutes’ to doing ‘more involved, bigger projects’ and ‘just less work’ overall (facilitated by a stint on Ru Paul's Drag Race Down Under, filmed during the pandemic).
Nevertheless, divergences depended on JobKeeper eligibility criteria. Many of those deemed ineligible were already the most precarious, reliant on intermittent or casual work in the performing arts, for instance (where contracts are tied to runs of individual shows): The problem was the individual artists weren’t looked after. It's great that my theatre company stayed alive and we got JobKeeper, but there's no theatre company without artists, and the artists got hosed…. There wasn’t anything for individuals…. I think there's merit [when] people … make the decision of, ‘No, I don’t want to be in this business.’ It's a tough, unkind business anyway. I mean it's brutal. (Andrew, independent theatre producer) I had been paid the highest composition fee I’d ever been paid, and couldn’t work out a way for it not to skew my eligibility… It was great to have the money, but reporting that was like, ‘what did you make last month?’ was like a huge sum of money, compared to the month before.
A (pre-pandemic) internalised acceptance that most creative work goes unpaid exacerbated matters (cf. Gibson, 2003). Describing her discomfort in applying for JobKeeper payments, Alice explained: It's never the case, except perhaps at the very extreme end of … fame … that what you [earn] could ever be proper remuneration for the work that you put in. [That] deep, cultural messaging … lurks in the background when I assess a question like ‘is this public money for me?’
Prevalent livelihood fluctuations were brought to the fore, with the ability to adapt, and cope – financially and emotionally – both highly varied and somewhat arbitrary.
Networked and scaled spaces of creativity
Eroding face-to-face capacities to socialise, participate in scenes, and share work opportunities, the pandemic also amplified precarity through interruptions to – and in some cases breakdowns of – creative networks. Structural change reshaped entire landscapes of creative work, sometimes in unexpected ways. H highlighted the impacts of pandemic-induced arts festivals closures – ‘quite a lot … have gone broke or don’t exist any more’. For theatre producer Dom, festival shutdowns impacted on quality of work, starving local companies of the interactions and inspirations from touring international shows. Other interruptions Dom noted included high school students declining to enrol in drama courses, creating a gap in the actor pipeline, and students missing out on the ‘live it and breathe it’ skill development of conservatoire training – ‘their vocal work in particular and their physical work [is] reduced’. Graduating students entering the industry missed opportunities to be seen performing by industry gatekeepers and were denied opportunities to attend the theatre themselves: ‘Students come out and they don’t know the [theatre] companies … haven’t seen anything, don’t understand these spaces.’ Impacts were thus both professional and geographical, as lost access to networks combined with lost access to creative spaces, and their attendant milieux.
Interruptions to creative networks for those early in their creative careers contrasted with established artists who could draw on existing networks to continue, albeit with adapted, and often rescaled geographies. Playwright Katie P's weekly Zoom with other playwrights ‘to keep our brains alive’ turned into a published book of mini-plays. Having travelled to his family home in regional NSW after his theatre shut down, Andrew contacted a playwright to request an online reading: It's one of the good things about having a Rolodex…. The writer knew Alec Baldwin, so I said, ‘Could we ask Alec Baldwin?’… two days later, he was like, ‘Yeah, Alec's in’ … we had Alec Baldwin and 20,000 people … watch[ed] this thing that we did…. By the next week we’d gone to Rose Byrne and asked her if she could do the next one. If you’re making good work people will see it…. Being aware of what is being made all over the world has made Australia part of a global art dialogue that [it] hasn’t been a part of in the past…. I’ve gotten heaps of international opportunities just through Instagram.
After her exhibition was shut down, visual artist Ana found solace through an artistic community: ‘we all talked about it on Instagram [and] we kept talking to each other’, alleviating somewhat the loss of sociable plein airs (outdoor drawing sessions) that Ana would attend prior to the pandemic.
Yet, for others, the severance of social ties that underpin collective forms of creativity, through the fracturing of creative scenes, worsened feelings of isolation and vulnerability. Dom said of many young theatre artists lacking the skills to network, ‘you can tell that they feel like the social stings of that’. Ben P, whose lockdowns were fruitful in terms of creative production, over time felt the loss of connecting in-person with both collaborators and audiences: ‘playing music with other people is very different to making it on a computer…. Music is a social activity.’ Similarly, Ben N recounted his experience of being unable to play music with others as a mental health challenge, needing ‘other people to inspire, to create, to work with’ (cf. Brunt and Nelligan, 2021). Precarious work, then, was not solely experienced as intermittent income or lack of job security, but also as an affective-emotional precarity (cf. Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2008). For Laura: There was no distinction between work and my creative life. To … turn on creative brain from work brain is really, really, hard…. I started to dread going into work … when you’re in that environment the whole time, it's hard to switch off…. It was really, really, hard [and] a little bit depressing. That was the most painful part … 90% of success is showing up, so when you’re physically prevented from showing up … how do you succeed? Visibility was completely taken away.
While the pandemic impacted upon the character and scale of networks, it also underscored the inextricability of socialisation from creative (net)working.
Precarious housing and home
The precarity of creative work also intertwined with socio-geographical dynamics unfurling beyond the specific forms and conditions of employment. Sydney's culture of real estate speculation and extreme property wealth disparities have long shaped the precarity of creative spaces, only to worsen with the Covid crisis. Sydney regularly ranks in the top five most expensive cities globally and has some of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD's) poorest protections for renters. Among creative workers interviewed, this manifested in exacerbated tenure insecurity and housing inequalities, including sometimes stark differences between homeowner-occupiers and renters. Those in secure housing were able to use lockdown time and government financial support to upskill and invest in creativity; many renters fared much worse: We were the first small theatre in the country to shut down…. Then I lost my apartment, so I retreated to Lithgow where I grew up…. There was a renewal of the lease, and I couldn’t fulfil it because all my work had gone…. They wanted to increase my rent and me to sign on for another 12 months, and we’d just shut the business. (Andrew, theatre producer) My ex and I owned the house. Well, the bank owned it. And we put up a little, small studio out the back…. I could have all my gear, leave it, come back to it, and have space to work…. It wasn’t a big space, but it was mine, and no one could kick me out of it…. [Now] I don’t have a studio … so I do some stuff from home … making small sculptures in my bedroom. [It's] not great.
Tenure precarity was in turn compounded by the necessities of working from home. We were told of landlords receiving government rent subsidies that were not passed on to tenants, and the inability of those engaging in creative work from home to shape domestic space appropriately due to rent, set-up cost, risk of eviction, and local council regulations. One music producer, for example, sank $30,000 into a professional home studio in a garage of a rental house, only to be evicted, and then, after reconstructing the facility in a new home, falling foul of local council regulations that resulted in a rejected development application.
Pandemic pressures to work from home while further juggling life circumstances and responsibilities placed an uneven burden upon some creative workers, especially women. Artistic director, actor and drama teacher Kate B recalled: There were definitely times when I was in a foetal position! I would see some of my creative friends post a song they’d just written … playing this cool song they’d just created, or they’d filmed this amazing film in their bedroom. And I was just like: ‘wild!’ I have no creative instinct or inspiration in my body right now. I’m using all my energy to just get out of bed, make the tea, and make sure the kids are fed, and see if they vaguely do their schoolwork.
Precarious spaces of creative production
Beyond the home, other spaces of production remained vulnerable amidst Sydney's speculative real estate culture. Finding places to develop and produce work was already a significant challenge outside of pandemic times. Alice recalled recent work with an established group who ‘routinely rehearse’ in the artistic director's own home: That is a super-crap situation for an established ensemble [with] all the measures of public acclaim. You would say those people would have resources…. There is this wild and woolly range of spaces one's rehearsing in. More artists are in more precarious situations, and so … artists who are quite super-established [are] going for those [one- or two-year residencies]. [You] feel like, wow, it's so wild that you don’t actually have somewhere permanent…. They’re not ‘emerging’ artist spaces any more.
Another reflected that without more substantial, structural changes, ‘in terms of the overall effect on an artist's life and financial security’ subsidised creative spaces are ‘blips on the radar’. As Katie explained: ‘Sydney has lost a lot of performance spaces over the past decade, but it's really telescoped in the past few years. There is now nowhere you can go where you can just hire a space and put a show on as an independent arts maker’. Even the independent theatre scene, she explained: now works under … a gatekeeper model. The seasons are curated by an artistic company who have taken over the space. Spaces are no longer run by an individual who just runs the space and rents it out to companies or individuals.
Access to such spaces was crucial for Katie: ‘It makes you feel like you are an artist if you are working in the space. Space is really important; if you are in the theatre you feel like a theatre artist.’ During Covid, unable to access the physical space of the theatre and put on shows: There was a long time where I didn’t write anything. There just didn’t seem to be any point…. You can sit there and write for yourself as much as you like, but if it's never put on … it doesn’t actually exist as a piece of theatre. It only exists as a script on the page…. [Online readings] didn’t have the kind of buzz. [The] point of theatre is about being in a space live with other people.
Artists’ needs – space, equipment, facilities, accessibility, and especially affordability – add to the challenges of finding suitable spaces. Participants spoke to diverse and specific space requirements (cf. Ang et al., 2018), and how the pandemic variously interrupted or denied these – or precipitated adaptations to creative practice. For Katie P, ‘Reasonably priced rehearsal space is always the most difficult thing.’ Rémi's band, who practise at night due to day-job commitments, needed a hired rehearsal space due to the ‘loud bass’ but during lockdown could not access one. Visual artist Eloise explained that in between studio residencies, often of a year or two: Artists have heaps of gear that has to be stored somewhere…. Then you have to move all your stuff again, your equipment, your archives, your tools…. It's expensive and it's exhausting.
Having to shift to working from home was, for visual artist Julia, ‘just chaotic. My housemates did not like it.’
Informality is often a simple necessity to meet some of the diverse needs of artists in the ever-gentrifying city (Mould, 2018), especially for ‘independent’ and ‘underground’ arts and creative expressions (Lyons, 2016; Shaw, 2005, 2013). But with informality comes vulnerability: lack of tenure security, exposure to change, and especially eviction during times of stress and disruption. There were many stories about the loss of informal spaces. As Laura recalled: Pre-pandemic … we would go to places that don’t even exist now … there's a lot of Marrickville rehearsal spaces that we would go to … one they got rid of because of the WestConnex [motorway] development that was right beside Sydenham Station. That was really great.
Industrial-zoned space – often home to such informal uses – is similarly key to meeting the needs of creative workers, particularly those requiring large areas and/or suitable facilities to use noisy and messy equipment, power tools, amplifiers, paint, and chemicals (Gibson et al., 2017). H described the function of their multi-purpose studio, Tortuga: It is full purpose. It's old, it's broken down, we can experiment, we can do ridiculous things, we can challenge the boundaries of what's acceptable because it's a suitable space. It's industrial, it's got huge hoists everywhere, it's got steel beams…. It's the amount of space, the physical space…. We quite often have giant scenery builds downstairs that need metres of space.
However, these are increasingly rare in the context of real estate speculation, widespread rezonings, and residential development (Gibson et al., 2017; Martin and Grodach, 2023). H described how: When we first arrived here there were countless other creative spaces around and so we had a very strong creative infrastructure or community. Now we’re the last ones standing…. We struggle a lot because we are no longer in an industrial zone.
Managing the impacts of Covid amid the constant threat of development was a challenge: Initially, it was trying to find money…. Genuinely thought we were going to have to close the place down and that was incredibly distressing…. I managed to secure three grants … but we also had a landlord who understood the value in dropping the rent so that we could stay…. But, all the grant funding stuff, it took months … there's no reward for my time doing that. We are lucky enough to have family who can help us bridge the gap. We’re still paying back those loans.
Outside of the industrial realm, major institutions have an important role to play in supplying large spaces for backspace functions such as set design and rehearsal. Yet space scarcity means they must act as gatekeepers, providing access for certain artists while disappointing many others. Alice described working with resident companies at one such space: We’re not always rehearsing at Carriageworks, because either those spaces are in demand from other resident companies, or Carriageworks, in order to sustain themselves, has to run commercial rentals of those spaces to people who pay tons of money.
Reflective of the city's overall extreme property market, some space providers also charge high costs, regardless of purpose, as theatre producer Andrew found when looking for a rehearsal space for a Sydney Opera House production: We couldn't find anywhere big enough. There was a gap in availability at the University of Sydney for about three and a half weeks, which is what I needed. In my head I would have gone … ‘great’…. So when [they] turn around and say how much ridiculous money it's going to cost, I go, well, that's just too hard … and it doesn’t need to be that hard…. That's the thing when it becomes a commodity…. Me coming in to rehearse a play shouldn’t be costed in the same way that you think about a corporate [event or a] wedding.
While access to rehearsal space has been a long-running problem, Andrew cites that pandemic precarity has diminished appetites to ‘schlep it’, making it more difficult to find suitable spaces: [Before] there was a little bit more grittiness to the independent sector…. We’d rehearse [plays] in parks … living rooms … at the top level of the [Old] Fitz [Hotel] in a tiny little room that was probably the size of this table…. Not that we were demanding it before, but it just came with the territory.
Space took on additional significance due to fears around proximity and venue and workplace rules limiting occupancy – sometimes in direct correlation with the size of the space. Certain artist studios, performance venues and rehearsal studios accommodated imposed health occupancy rules, while others could not. Social distancing restrictions only further limited options, intensifying competition for larger spaces. Live performance venues were most immediately affected. Music venue The Gasoline Pony closed its doors and began online-only gigs from the venue, without in-person audiences. While initially successful – as Ben N explained: ‘we usually play to 40 or 50 people; our first Zoom show was witnessed by 4000 people’ – audience numbers fell as listeners became fatigued by the online format and missed the visceral impact of in-the-flesh sound. In contrast, those with access to larger spaces enjoyed continuity of work, despite health occupancy regulations. As the local screen industry was inundated with work, Tortuga Studios became even more critical for the artists: The amount of space we have means people could work within a 1.5 metre boundary … Provid[ing] that was essential. A lot of creatives here wouldn’t still be in business…. You can’t do some of that work at home.
Covid restrictions and space limitations also shaped the character of creative work, in sometimes surprising ways. With shows cancelled and general uncertainty about costs and audiences, Katie P performed in her own play ‘which I have not done since I was at university’, developing it as a one-woman show to minimise risk. In lieu of painting in the studio, Ana focused instead on ‘looking and drawing’ to avoid the messiness of painting at home. Among creative workers, adaptations to space insecurity diverged – illustrative of the degree to which capabilities to influence working conditions vary with structural as well as personal circumstances (cf. Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2023; Strauss, 2020). In divergent ways, the vagaries of geography, and how creative work operates in and through dispersed sites across the city, intersected with livelihood precarity.
Unending precarity?
The reality is that we’re actually still in the pandemic, and we’re dealing with the fallout of it. And we will be for a long time (Laura, musician).
Creative workers are experiencing the pandemic's long tail. Some are emerging with flourishing creative careers, especially where government support meshed with creative adaptations to personal geographies, ability to afford and access suitable creative spaces, savvy creative choices, and supportive life circumstances. Visual artist, Julia, has expanded her work in new and fruitful directions, with a more established and recognised practice. Receiving JobKeeper through her work at a major arts institution, a fortuitous studio residency provided a workspace. Being shortlisted for a fellowship at a large institutional venue granted the opportunity to develop new and larger work (the size and scope of which further expanded as the exhibition space was rearranged for social distancing). Julia emerged from the pandemic with several works sold, commercial gallery representation, local and international commissions, and the ability to rent a (shared) studio space that she cites as critical for productivity and maintaining a professional profile. She has since won the Archibald Prize, Australia's premier portraiture award, plus other prizes and international residencies. Not without its challenges – making art in a sharehouse being one – Julia adjusted her practice for lockdown environments, using the materials around her and creating work in segments: In my bedroom, I started working with clothes [because] it was the material that was around me…. Before Covid I was mainly teaching, [then] I got very lucky [with the] residency…. Having dedicated time and space is an anomaly…. That kick-started everything…. [The studio residency] was supposed to be a year … [but] because of [intermittent access during] Covid we had it for an extended period…. By the time my residency ended, I could afford to have a studio…. It took that bridge.
Some creative workers thrived with financial support, time, and space (albeit intermittently accessible), and the ability to maintain and build networks – in Julia's case helped by Instagram. Yet others’ experiences diverged markedly. Uneven burdens have been borne by women, those with caring responsibilities, and others juggling multiple responsibilities. For many, precarity prevails amidst slow recovery. Theatre producer Andrew described the challenges of ongoing recovery, despite developing six new projects: ‘we’re still wading through the financial deficit [and] trying to find the right personnel’. On top of that, the continued loss of post-show foyer activity was evidence that still, ‘the community is fractured’. Despite the ongoing fallout, emergency government support has been withdrawn, and for many artists and organisations, financial viability remains ‘constantly rocky…. Most of the people I work for receive vastly less [funding] … They are scrambling!’ (Alice). Performing artists also reflected on audiences, now more likely to stay home, compounded by a cost of living crisis: ‘I think they got used … to staying in,’ reflected Oli. Katie P had had a performance cancelled by producers two days prior because of low booking numbers, only to then have several people attempt to buy tickets. Managing precarity, audience engagement and production costs remains an enduring problem, as Katie explained: ‘you’ve still got to get people off their sofa. [It] comes down to price, because it's so expensive to rent a space.’ The pandemic's ongoing reverberations shape the viability of creative livelihoods and spaces.
Conclusion
Pandemic experiences have unevenly but substantially impacted upon creative workers. While venue closures, loss of performance opportunities, and uneven eligibility and access to government income support were all critical factors, access to space for sites of work and creative scenes also guided the degree of continuity or interruptions to creative livelihoods. Such impacts were felt across sectors and career stages, illustrating the expansive character of creative work well beyond sites of cultural consumption (Gibson et al., 2023). We concur with Banks and O’Connor (2021: 11–12) that, as post-pandemic cultural policymaking ensues, the creative sectors must ‘address the many and varied forms of inequality, injustice and discrimination that remain prevalent’. This article, and the broader study it informs, draw attention to geographical factors also shaping unequal experiences of creative work.
In consequence, we invite theorisations of creative work that understand that work as geographical, as co-constituted in space. Generating grounded ‘spatially literate responses’ (Brennan-Horley and Gibson, 2009: 2596) to questions around the experiences of creative work in the city further illuminated the expansive and diverse character of this work. We revealed how creative work unfolded and was challenged during pandemic conditions, in a city in which extreme housing wealth and inequality has undermined the stability of housing tenure for many, and the viability of diverse creative spaces (for rehearsal, production, and performance). In (post-)pandemic Sydney, life itself is more precarious for all without the means to pay (Pawson et al., 2021). If the creative sectors are to flourish, supporting diverse, well-remunerated and satisfying work, there must be accompanying discussions of the precarious conditions of urban life, the locational needs of creative workers, social polarisation, and porous boundaries between matters of work and home.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Australian Research Council (grant number DP220100756).
Notes
Author biographies
Peta Wolifson is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wollongong, with expertise in urban geography, creative industries, and the politics of the night-time economy.
Chris Gibson is a senior professor of Human Geography at the University of Wollongong and fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia.
Chris Brennan-Horley is lecturer in Geography at the University of Wollongong, with expertise in applications of qualitative Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to diverse topics including the geography of creative work.
Nicole Cook is senior lecturer in Urban Geography at the University of Wollongong, with expertise in geographies of housing and home.
Pauline McGuirk is a senior professor of Human Geography at the University of Wollongong and fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia.
Andrew Warren is senior lecturer in Urban Geography at the University of Wollongong, with expertise in labour geographies.