A Class Apart (Axisweb)

Working-Class Artist

I grew up with a family heritage shaped by extraction: tin mining on one side, coal mining on the other and every other labour intensive work you can mention associated with these. The histories beneath my feet are not a metaphor - they are literal seams of labour, generation upon generation who worked underground so their children one day will step into the light.  Mobility was never a given; it was a grind, a negotiation, a hope carried forward despite the odds. Every move toward what is imagined as ‘middle-class life’ felt less like social ascent and more trespassing into territory where accents, references, and senses of humour arrived already out of place.

Even today, with degrees, work in exhibitions, public art sculptures and a C.V. that reads as evidence of having crossed some invisible threshold, I continue to be read through the lens of where I have come from.  In the art world, class is not a background detail - it is a diagnostic tool, a silent sorting mechanism.  The moment you walk into a room, people search your speech, your gestures, your clothing for clues: Who is your family? Which schools have shaped you? Who has introduced you to whom? Do you have the right words and pronunciations?  These questions hover unspoken, yet they determine access with astonishing precision.

The art industry likes to imagine itself as meritocracy, but the high art industry, behaves more like a hereditary estate.  Cultural capital is handed down like heirlooms to the curators, funders, gallerists - many inheriting the unspoken assurance that ‘they’ belong and ‘they’ decide.  

They become the gatekeepers of culture, not because they are better equipped to understand it, but because pathways were built with their footprints already in mind.

Coming from mining, transport and mechanical lineage means my relationship to culture is different: I was raised to value work that leaves something tangible, something held in the hands, something felt in the muscles.  The aches, the dirty hands, the cuts and bruises, the grind to eek a living, keeping a roof, heat in my room and food in my belly.  In contrast, the art world values the abstract, the conceptual, and the already-sanctioned discourse of those fluent in its codes.  

This creates an uneasy tension: I have learned the language, but still think in the dialect of my heritage.

I inhabit a cultural in-between.  

I have climbed, yes, but the climb has left calluses - reminders of where I began and of how often I am reminded that I still don’t quite yet belong.  Yet that working-class grounding grants me clarity that others mistake for roughness: intolerance for pretence; preference for the direct; a commitment to making art that remembers labour, resilience, heritage, struggle and all the unseen hands that shaped me and my culture.

The art world’s class prejudice has strengthened resolve. My practice is not merely about representation - it is about resistance. It is about the refusal to let inherited privilege monopolise culture. It is the insistence that voices of the working-class and the non-asset owning classes, also carry cultural knowledge that is as rich and necessary as any canon.

I come from a people who have carved their lives from the earth, and I carry that with me into every classroom, gallery, studio, funding app and conversation, where someone may quietly wonder whether I belong.  

I do.