In this Learning Exchange, our aim will be to develop a shared understanding of why we each make art the way we do, to appreciate the meanings of our practices to ourselves and others, and discuss the role of art in our evermore uncertain world. My provocation to you begins the question in the title, unfolding through a series of related questions to open up opportunity to share your ideas and experiences, and together imagine new possibilities. I will foreground those questions with some ideas about the affects and materialities of making art, and how their relationalities with the body produce particular aesthetics that create multiple meanings. To illustrate these concepts, I will share my own practice, through which I use film photographic methods in my academic research to understand how socially engaged artists make sense of why they do what they do despite having precarious working lives. I will present three tales of precarity from my current project.

Tim is Associate Professor of Organisation Studies at the Tasmanian School of Business and Economics. Before joining the University of Tasmania, he held academic positions at The Open University (UK), Griffith University, RMIT University and the University of Hull. Tim researches how we learn to adapt to evermore precarious work & worklessness.

He uses longitudinal visual ethnographic methods to understand how people make sense of their social, historical and emotional experiences of precarity. Tim currently collaborates with Arts organisations, including Counterpoints Arts and Tate Exchange in the UK to research precarious work in the Arts. His previous projects include: the ARC-funded ‘Wellbeing not Winning’ project, researching the value of sporting participation in remote Aboriginal communities; and Australian coworking/freelancer/startup