The Artists' Fair 2025

The whole entire art world is maxxed out on enough bad news for a lifetime. Money is hilariously nowhere to be found. Artists’ pay is hugely unstable, reliant on booking jobs in and thanking your lucky stars that you get to go to work. The median hourly rate paid to artists is £2.60. Median income is £12,500 PA (minimum wage is £23,795 btw). There’s a 40% pay gap if you’re a woman or working class, a 70% pay gap if you’re disabled. But if you’re getting paid at all, go back to thanking said lucky lucky lucky stars. Studio spaces are so expensive and precarious. The market is down, no one is buying art, even commerical galleries are feeling the pinch. London’s housing crisis means artists are being priced out of the city, the arts council’s slashed their budgets so many times, institutions are increasingly reliant on commercial income — I want to scream! The question of MAKING A LIVING in the arts is very urgent and tense, we are nearly at a rolling boil.

I arrive at Somerset House Studios, ready to scream and wet with rain, off to have a poke around the Artists’ Fair.

For context: Somerset House Studios should pride itself on being an actual working arts centre. There’s a couple of gallery spaces, a busy exhibition and events programme, but down in the bowels of the building there’s THE VAULTS. A bunch of half moon arches, urban legend says they used to be the servants quarters of this old royal palace. Now these spaces are artists studios, home to a wide range of artists working in a million different ways and directions. I have a desk space in the Exchange, a co-working space in the basement, a level above the Vaults. Whenever I emerge at ground level and scurry through the corridors in search of a meal deal, I run into these artists: Jasleen Kaur, John Costi, Harun Morrison, everyone! And here they are, in on a Saturday, manning stalls full of their wares.

My first stop is the Artist Market, the entire point of the weekend. The artist market is led by the artists themselves. They are paid for their participation and they keep 100% of their sales — without a gallery or a middleman scraping a cut out of the takings, this financial model means that stuff is pretty affordably priced. The vibe is less white tent, more car boot, the crowd full of other artists and families, grandmas, actual ordinary people — not the weird alien affluence of typical art fair crowds.

John Costi is stood at a stall that takes up most of the side wall — with work by an ecclectic mix of other artists. A huge Hannah Perry work is leaning against the fireplace behind him, and layers of actual print editions are stacked neatly in rows. If you’ve got money to spend, these are still objectively all a bargain. But John points past the stall, over to the side where there’s a foil-wrapped complaints box, a sign that reads GOTTAPROBLEMWITH THE ART WORLD? WANNA GET IT OFF YA CHEST? SUBMIT YOUR ART WORLD ART ACHES. He says he’s already had a bit of a snoop through some of the submissions, there were so many of them, surely everything is covered? Tomorrow afternoon he’ll crack the box open officially and respond to them, agony aunt style, group therapy, but mostly as a way to enact solidarity — these aches are ones we might not be alone in suffering through. Even if they are experienced only by us, we can shoulder them together and — at the very least — exorcise their bad vibes.

I linger for a chat with Aziza Kadyri who tells me about a new series of prints she’s been working on with Mouse Green: Kings of Babel, a multi-disciplinary project about Iraqi working-class youth and biker culture. There’s a series of high saturation prints in lurid colours laid out across their stall: a dove flying past as a biker reaches out to grasp its wings, a lad doing wheelies into the sunset, a kid posing as he and his bike are circled by a ring of fire. I take a photo of the spread to send to my boyfriend, waiting to hear back about which one he prefers — these smaller prints are only £25, something I can afford to fork out for. Aziza says that she typically works with textiles, tapestry, costume and embroidery, or performance — ephemeral modes that aren’t typically tied up in bog-standard commercial concerns (because trying to sell a performance is hilariously impossible). The fair is a chance to try something out, experiment with a print run to see what happens and how people will react.

Sam Williams is on the other side of the room, stall stocked with stuff that’s been hanging around his studio, ripe for a clear out. He points to a stack of publications, saying he had 10 of them at the start of the day. Why not free them? Put them out into the world and see what happens. Much better for them to exist in other places, in peoples hands and on shelves across the city than gathering dust in a corner of his studio. He also points out a series of collages he made specifically for the fair, things that’d make nice gifts: postcard sized, ready to slip into a frame or have a message scrawled on the back. He tells me he didn’t think there was much point in having a stall with two or three very expensive first edition prints, much better to put out stuff people can actually afford, and much better to actually make a tidy bit of cash in the process.

Sam’s point about people buying nice cool gifts makes me think about the way the art world conceptualises transactions, sales. Millionaires go to frieze and drop 6 figures on a painting — the rest of us go to galleries and museums to try and get a lingering glance at these things. A financial model that shrinks the scale of these transactions feels really cool; artists can skim the stuff around their main (and maybe less monetisable) practice and turn it into merch, people can buy postcards, keyrings, stickers, t shirts, prints, versions of the art they love, in ways that feel more at home in their actual lives. I rummage in my bag for my own set of keys, where I know there’s a neon yellow plastic lucky wish fish charm. Made by an artist in Newcastle, Natasha Loydell, who shrank an enormous sculpture from her degree show to this keyring scale. On my way around, I spy Philomene Pirecki, who has trained as a jeweller and started an experimental editions label called Gates of Vanitas — it sits alongside, maybe within, Pirecki’s practice, supporting it materially. Pirecki’s stall has got a selection of necklaces, earrings, jewellery that is also an edition of an artwork. I also spot Studios Residency Producer, Harry Leek (who co-curated the weekend), wearing a t shirt with a Danielle Brathwaite Shirley drawing across the chest — art-merch from another fair, another instance. But it proves to me that this is a model that artists are willing to play about with, the Artists Fair is just about giving them a space to come together and an audience to engage with, beyond the people that already know and love their work.

For the rest of the afternoon, I float around between side rooms where there’s a talks and events programme alongside the main fair. I linger at the back of the room to eavesdrop on a workshop with Spaghetti Club — a group of kids are participating in a crit, talking about artworks loaned by Somerset House Studios artists (today: Jasleen Kaur, Jenkin Van Zyl). Led by Michael Crowe, the group are chatting through the work in a way that feels like a wildly speculative Q&A session. The questions are misleadingly simple: Can an artwork be shy? (No, and also yes!) Why is this decorative element placed here? (To give it WEIRDNESS) What does it look like it’s made of? (Clouds!) What other kinds of object does it remind you of? (Cauliflowers) Do you like it? Do you have to like it? Is liking an artwork important, or can you talk or think about it all the same? Crowe leads the group into sticky complicated territory, and the kids are there with sticky complicated answers — about the nature of beauty, horror, disgust, aesthetic theory. They’re talking about it all in a way that gets into the work, gives it the time of day beyond a passing glance. Even though the parents dotted around the room are mostly silent, I reckon that they’re learning ways to cut into talking about or towards an artwork as well. ‘It’s hard to come across an artwork in a gallery that you've thought about more that the artist has thought about it’, Crowe says. I nod enthusiastically from my corner at the back. This crit feels like the best way to honour all that thinking.

I find myself sat in a circle of chairs, listening in as Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Jamilla Johnson-Small and Harun Morrison speak about housing, about how being an artist leaks into and complicates being able to access housing, about how precarity and crisis are experienced by artists (and everyone). Harun Morrison holds up a copy of a book called ABOLISH RENT by Travy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis. He insists that artists cannot separate themselves from wider political concerns, Socialist logic that would drive them to advocate for shorter working weeks, better payment across all sectors, community/communal/co-operative housing models, abolishing private property, enacting solidarity with each other — things that create a world that leaves us all more free to live well and have time to make and experience art.