The wiggly line of progress: stepping away from rising (sort of)
Eli sits on the grass on a sunny afternoon with three other young people. They have a pint in one hand and they're holding up a hand while talking, as if illustrating some grand point. The other people look at them, pensive.
Elinor Lower, Rising's first paid employee, reflects on leaving the agency's staff team after five-and-a-half years.
Hello, I'm Eli. I'm the Creative Practice Coordinator for Rising Arts Agency.
Over the past five-and-a-half years, I've had a lot of roles in the team. I've been a Creative Team Coordinator, a Development Assistant, and, back when the agency was just two people sat side-by-side in an arctic-cold studio, a Social Media and Marketing Intern.
And today, 6th April 2022, is my last day. I'm following in the footsteps of Founder Kamina Walton and stepping away from Rising Arts Agency. (Well, sort of. I’ll get into that.)
It’s definitely not at every job that the process of leaving prompts a desire to write a ~reflective thinkpiece detailing the journey you’ve been on / the reasons for the change / the whirlwind of thoughts storming through your mind.
But this is Rising. It’s different from other places. It was the first job I had in ‘the arts’, and it feels like a big decision to step away from it, so. Here we go.
Five people sit around a table strewn with paper. One is Eli. The photo is from 2018.
How It Started
In the summer of 2016, I was freshly graduated from an English degree, on a desperate hunt for a job that would let me flex my creative muscles. I worked random, inconsistent hours at a cinema that played fast and loose with employment law, volunteered on any creative or theatrical projects that would have me and spent early mornings scrolling morosely through artsjobs. Routes in seemed deliberately obscure; I didn’t know anyone who’d managed to find a way through.
But then Bristol Museum hosted a workshop called ‘Making It In The Creative Industries’ led by young artists from some new thing called Rising Arts Agency (who?) and the rest—I say, grandly—is history. Kamina needed a (paid) intern. I needed a job that didn't require me to hock sick out from between fabric seats at 3am. So, I became Rising’s first paid, part-time employee.
I still worked evenings and weekends elsewhere, but I had my first proper day of Rising work on the 22nd of September 2016. '16!!!!!
Today, I will be stepping away from the staff team and transitioning into the creative community. A community of artists that, over the last five-and-a-half years has grown into something unimaginably brilliant. A community banded together by a belief that things can and will be better, that collaboration is what makes us stronger, that failure is nothing to be afraid of, and that we must (MUST!!!!!) protect joy at all costs.
Image credit: ShamPhat
Thoughts on “Progress”
I have been wondering about what it means for me to move in this direction. To step from a (part-time) salaried position into freelance life whilst still very much in the shadow of a global pandemic. I’ve wondered whether this is—or will look like—a backwards step. After all, the well-trodden narrative runs in the other direction: you join something as a participant; you take part in a few projects, get to know the facilitators, the staff, the people that keep it running, perhaps you do a few odd jobs until, one day, a position in the permanent crew opens up and (pending an application process) you step into something secure—something permanent. It’s a narrative of progression that makes sense, capitalistically. Precarity into stability.
But is a salary the apex?
We say, often, that progress isn’t linear. Anyone working in the arts or a similarly unpredictable industry knows that even a forceful upward trajectory might suddenly plateau or fall away altogether. Just because you secure one commission doesn’t mean a second will follow, and the fickle funding trends that flood your way one season might run dry the next. But even if the path bends back on itself one hundred times, it’s still progress—and it looks different for everyone.
A photo of the whole Rising staff team. They are stood in front of a #WhoseFuture billboard that reads "DEMAND JOY", and they are all laughing and smiling at each other.
When I joined Rising in 2016 the community barely existed. We had a huddle of young creatives who knew Kamina, but we hadn’t yet cracked a system for supporting them, and it would be another couple of years before it evolved into the furious, self-sustaining creative ecosystem it is now.
Now, there is this incredible family of people that I am desperate to be a part of. To truly throw myself into and engage with as peers. To do this, for me, is progress. Growth.
I have loved being a member of the Rising team. It’s been a kind of crash course in the arts; punching green, hungry young people through industry gates to sit at tables we’d usually need years (if not decades) more experience to "earn" a place at.
The Rising team stand in front of billboards that read "we are rising", "young people are leaders now"
And here, in 2022, we’ve mounted THREE citywide billboard campaigns (and counting). Supported scores of young people onto the boards and other decision-making positions in arts organisations across the South West. Created endless excuses to put money in people’s bank accounts in a pandemic. Interrogated care and wellbeing under capitalism (and how we might kick down the superstructures that oppress us). I’ve had the chance to sit on the other side of the hiring process, get my brain around strategy, pitch big funds for truly ludicrous quantities of money (and get it). I co-delivered the closing plenary of a Fundraising Conference at the National Gallery! Lol!!!!!!!!
I have done all this, supporting artists across the city—some older than me, many my own age—and now I am ready to have a go of my own. I’m ready to take a punt on myself as an artist and explore what a creative practice might actually look like for me. How I can embed the ideals I’ve excavated at Rising—of collective action, of true transparent knowledge exchange, of decolonisation, of anger and love and gathering and celebration—into making shit that sets my brain alight.
I have no doubt that the path ahead will send me regularly back into zero-hour customer service work, but to give myself the time to actively pursue my own creativity? That's progress for me.
I am enormously privileged to have had this experience at Rising.
I will treasure it forever.
Onwards.
(((((And if anyone needs a shit-hot writer / dramaturg / teammate / facilitator / whatever else, give me a shout.)))))