I’m really lucky in that I have a Summer House in my garden that is large enough to use as an art studio. It started out life as a home office whilst we had work done on our home, and I then took it over as an art studio in 2020 when I started on my student journey.

I could rent a studio space as there are a few places locally to me that offer studios to rent, The Cheddar Arts Quarte, Peoples Republic of Stokes Croft, The Old Quarry (when its been refurbished) and The Stables. The prices for the studio space depending on size and what you wish to work on range from £110-£300 pcm. That’s quite a lot of money for an emerging artist to commit to on a monthly basis. I have another income stream, but even I feel I would need to have a regular sales income from my art before I committed to it.

As a mixed media artist the hardest part has been to decide how I would like my studio to be set up, because working with clay and printing they both need different environments to work in. One is a clean environment but the other by it’s nature is quite dirty.

I am able to arrange it with an area to store papers flat and have a clean surface for preparing my lino prints and creating small print runs. I can arrange for a dirty area worktop in which I can model my clay and roll my slabs, ideally I don’t want to be doing both at the same time. I am able to hire the facilities at Print Works Weston for £25 a day, this means all my printing work can be done in a clean environment.
I also don’t have the room for too many large pieces of equipment and have found kiln hire locally that I can use for my ceramics at an average cost of £12 per firing. I also go to a ceramics group once a week and have the ability to create work there.

The main piece of equipment I will possibly consider purchasing is Clay Slab Roller at a cost of £1,800 including vat as it eases the process of ceramic relief tile portraits. Rolling the lino into the clay with the correct pressure to create a relief is quite taxing on the arms and shoulders, especially with the larger pieces.

My studio space is very conveniently a nice rectangular shape with a window and french doors on the front side, which means I am able to have my paper storage and clean desk space on the back wall. Plenty of storage for paints, pigments and other bits and pieces on the short sides with room for another workspace and easle space.