Five years ago I made the leap from a secure job in communications at the University of Oxford to become a self-employed artist. Gulp! I’d started printmaking a few years before and had been getting very into it in my spare time, taking on commissions from friends and colleagues. While this was great for stretching the limits of my abilities, it was not a good way of making a living. My perfectionist tendencies meant I was putting so much into each piece that I was probably earning minus 5p an hour - time for a change of business strategy!
So I turned my attention to just making prints of things I liked. I don’t know whether it was the influence of our restricted lives in those Covid times, but the subjects I decided to tackle were all within my Oxford postcode, resulting in my OX4 series of prints of Oxford rowers, Florence Park and Aston’s Eyot, one of our local nature reserves. Perhaps it was a small act of resistance against the most celebrated Oxford sights always grabbing all the artistic attention! Other local subjects have included Hinksey lido and Cowley library, and it’s been great to see customers connect with these prints.
Things started to improve, business-wise. But, to quote one of my favourite bands, “the trouble with your own thing is you end up on your own”, and I was really struggling working on my own (especially having been spoilt with great colleagues in all my previous jobs). Every day felt like a never-ending spiral of self-doubt and doom. I was certainly fulfilling the ‘suffering for your art’ requirement!
So I tried to break this cycle by doing things like getting out of the studio to meet a friend for a midweek coffee, and joining a weekly volunteer gardening group. I also got a bunch of my artist friends together to exhibit as a big group during Oxfordshire Artweeks, which led to us becoming the East Oxford Art Collective. This led to the realisation that it was the camaraderie, the strength in numbers and the new connections with people - both makers and customers - at exhibitions and markets that, apart from the making itself, was the thing I loved about life as an artist. I saw as well how much people love getting to know artists from their neighbourhood and talking to them about their work, and the genuine appreciation there is out there for the time, patience and skill that goes into pieces that are handmade.
So that’s the aim of Made In Oxford, to connect people with Oxford makers and showcase their incredible creativity and skill, and to share that with the wider world. Oxford has a special place in many people’s hearts, and many of the pieces you’ll find on the site are depictions of our beautiful city, through the eyes of artists with a huge variety of styles and perspectives. But it’s also a celebration of the city’s makers and the diversity of their approaches and skillsets, even when they’re working within the same medium.
I feel that making is somehow flourishing despite the pressures of our ever more fast and furious, tech-dominated world. The question is how to connect these beautiful, handmade objects - be they ceramics, jewellery, paintings or prints - with people who want to buy them, in a very crowded and noisy online world. I hope to forge that connection by telling the stories of the artists and craftspeople behind the work, showing their process and finding out why they do what they do. Ultimately, I'd love to have a bricks-and-mortar shop, so watch this space!
I hope you'll love hearing the fascinating stories of our artists and their work - stay in the loop by following us at @madeinoxford.shop on Instagram, and subscribing to our newsletter with the form below.