To my Artist and Art worker friends I want say something important: I’m sure some of you are experiencing a strange series of emotions presently. Some of you have been given opportunities you’ve never had before, as a direct response to the collapse of our industry.

These moments and opportunities are possibly things you’ve been waiting your whole career to have. And they were given to you in good faith and with support at their heart. But they are built on expectations that you ‘make’ things happen in 2021, manifest culture for us this year

And quietly and even loudly you are feeling, noticing, sensing that everything is out of alignment. No single conversation you have about any of it feels secure. Every promise you are being asked to make feels like a risk. And it’s making you feel unprofessional, even unworthy.

There is a ‘rushing’ to fill the vacuum for experience in the air, and your work and your career are seen as some part of the solution to that. Yet the more you try to manifest your idea the more at-risk you and your career feel.

And these opportunities, although incredible, are also exposing you to failure. Failure you know after this year won’t be remembered as simply caused by Covid. They will just be attached to your reputation.

I’m here to just say all those feelings are completely normal. And all your peers feel the same. And all the organisations feel the same. And all the audiences feel the same. Discuss it with each other. Make the radical act to slow down. Scale down. And share why.

We are not going to be able to do anything the way we used to. Not just in the way we conceive of ideas, or manifest them or share them. Even the BASICS are now much more complex and much slower. Nothing is working as it was.

Don’t allow anything to expose you and your well-being and your career to implosion for the sake of an appetite for event and experience you cannot begin to satisfy. Work as hard as you can. Make what you can. And admit when you are worried or need to change course.

Part of crisis is concession. And conceding to something is also an act of making peace with it. Good luck with it all. And as a good friend of mine said, make the radical decision to simply slow down.