How Do You Keep Making?

What does it take to keep an art practice going while raising children, navigating mental health and trying to make a living?

Join artists Hannah Perry, Nicky Petrie and Rhys Coren chaired by Rosie Reed for an open conversation about the realities of sustaining a creative practice alongside parenthood and everyday life. The panel will explore the pressures, compromises, joys and unexpected possibilities that come with making work while also caring for others — and what happens to an artistic practice when life doesn’t leave much room for it.

The conversation will be chaired/hosted at Quench Gallery, with space for honest discussion around creativity, care, ambition, identity, time and mental health.

Art Youth Club

We know that getting to an artist talk can be difficult when you’re a parent. During the panel, Gemma Pharo will run an Art Youth Club upstairs at Quench for young people, giving parents the opportunity to enjoy the conversation while their children take part in a creative session. The discussion will happen with the sound of your young people making art upstairs!

Spaces for the Art Youth Club are very limited and must be booked in advance.

This event takes place on the opening day of the exhibition, ahead of the exhibition’s private view at 6pm. Places for the talk are also limited, so booking is recommended.

Talk: 2pmArt

Youth Club: 2pm

Private View: 6pm

Come for the conversation, stay for the exhibition.

About the exhibition

Places are very limited for this talk so we can take good care of you and your young people. Please return all tickets you cannot use so pleaces can be filled accordingly.

The talk takes place as part of Where Is My Mind?, a group exhibition exploring mental health, neurodivergence, identity and the often complicated relationship between our inner lives and the world around us.

Bringing together artists whose work approaches these subjects from different perspectives, the exhibition asks how we understand ourselves when the systems, expectations and environments around us don’t always fit the way our minds work.

Where Is My Mind? is interested in the messy, personal and sometimes contradictory realities of mental health. Rather than presenting a single idea of what wellbeing, difference or neurodivergence looks like, the exhibition creates space for multiple experiences, perspectives and ways of thinking.

The conversation around parenthood, mental health and maintaining an art practice sits within this wider context. For many artists, the ability to make work is shaped by care, money, time, family, access and mental wellbeing. This panel opens up that conversation through the lived experiences of artists who are navigating these pressures alongside their practices.

The exhibition runs at Quench Gallery, with the opening day on Saturday 29 August. Following the talk, the gallery will host the exhibition’s private view from 6pm.