Artistic Practices: How to support an artist and how artists expect to be supported, integrating art making and caregiving.

Parenting is work, and it must be recognised and valued as such. Current systems often assume a standard 8am–6pm model of labour and childcare, but not all families operate within this framework. Some parents actively choose approaches to caregiving that fall outside conventional schedules, while others have no choice but to care full-time for their children due to systemic, financial, or personal circumstances. In these cases, they are often left in the invisibility of caregiving, with little to no infrastructure, community support, or public presence around them. Recognising parenting as a legitimate and essential contribution to society, on par with other forms of labour, is critical to building inclusive, integrated models of support.

It’s not only about logistics, although affordability, flexibility, and lack of age restrictions matter. It’s also about the psychological shift that happens when support is understood as collective. Workshops, peer exchanges, and community events become the ‘village’ that sustains creative life. Residencies that engage local families, host intergenerational activities, and integrate community-building around the visiting artists’ family help bridge gaps, not just in practical support, but in professional connection. Facilitating online private views ensures that artists stay visible and connected with artists, curators and anyone participating in the making of an exhibition or art platform, digital networking, or community-rooted commissions, even when they can’t be physically present. Mentoring schemes, interdisciplinary signposting, and community-rooted commissions that consider wellbeing and trauma-informed practices expand the network of support far beyond the studio.

When care is integrated into cultural practice, artists can be present with their children and their work, while sharing space with others navigating similar paths. Their artistic practice doesn’t turn into a luxury or afterthought, but becomes a living process that evolves alongside daily life. As one artist described, the studio became a “sanctuary” for them and their child, a place of co-creation and mutual *growth.

Artists who are also parents often describe a sense of fragmentation: the pressure to separate caregiving from professional life, the loss of creative time, the invisibility within traditional structures. In mainstream spaces, this often translates into silencing one part of themselves to make the other “fit.” But when care is integrated, something else can happen. 

Again and again, artists tell us how working in Integrated Care  environments allows their practice to breathe differently. Without the performance of ‘separateness,’ the artwork becomes more embodied, more connected to lived experience. There’s space to take risks, pause when needed, and come back with new insights with the two journeys informing each other.

Visibility also matters. Procreate Project has brought work by artist-mothers into major institutions and critical conversations through exhibitions like the Mother Art Prize and its ever-growing archive, for example. This act of visibilisation not only validates individual practice, it also rewrites the assumptions about what an artist’s life can look like. It opens up space for different timelines, processes, and bodies of work whose development has been shaped by caregiving responsibilities and/or other life complexities.

Integrated Care isn’t just a nice add-on, it’s a core infrastructure that supports the unfolding of practice beyond extractive timelines or market pressures. It allows for a reimagining of artistic identity through non-judgemental, shared spaces, where the experience of parenting is not an obstacle but part of the creative terrain.

In these environments, artists find not only a place to work, but a place to be witnessed, as humxns who navigate caregiving, ambition, grief, joy, and change. And that witnessing is what makes all the difference.

Art is work, and it happens within specific conditions. Access to time, space, and resources makes it possible for artists with caring responsibilities to sustain their practice without separating creativity from care. Supporting integrated care within artistic practice models is about building systems that allow creativity and caregiving to exist together, without forcing one to eclipse the other.

Recognising Parenting as Work

Parenting must be acknowledged as a vital form of labour, equal in value to paid work. Families do not all operate within the assumed 8am–6pm model, and many care full-time for children due to systemic, financial, or personal circumstances. For too long this work has been invisible, unsupported, and excluded from cultural infrastructures. Embedding care into the design of studios, residencies, policies, and opportunities is essential for artists trying to sustain their practices along with their caregiving responsibilities.

Relationships, Boundaries and Listening

Every opportunity should be approached as the beginning of a relationship, not a one-off transaction. This requires recognising the power dynamics at play, acknowledging our own position, and framing our responses in a way that is consciousness-raising for all parties, rather than an extractive perspective. 

Relationships between organisations and artists should be regarded as spaces of mutual learning, exchange, and transformation, and should therefore be built on trust, care, and transparency. Clear boundaries, openly communicated, help protect both sides.

Alongside this, institutions, galleries, community groups, curators, and project partners, should aim to build safe spaces for artists to share their personal circumstances without judgement. Introductory meetings are a chance to align expectations, establish mutual needs, and offer different ways for artists to communicate them. Transparency around budgets and financial resources is equally important, ensuring clarity about what is available and how funds are distributed. Access needs forms should be offered as standard, signalling openness and commitment to dialogue.

Removing Barriers and Offering Flexible Structures

Too often, opportunities exclude parents through arbitrary restrictions, whether implicit or explicit. Creating truly inclusive programmes requires fundamental changes to how we structure opportunities. Removing age and time limits from residencies, open calls, and prizes is essential, as is avoiding rigid definitions of career, productivity or artistic outcomes.  Presence, process, and evolution of one’s practice should be valued instead. Specifically for caregiving artists,  practices may change shape due to their caregiving realities. This shift is not a weakness, but an adaptation that deserves to be honoured and supported.

Programmes should also include hybrid or remote options, foresee adaptable schedules, and timelines that respond to life rhythms, rather than market pressures.

Flexibility lies at the heart of integrated care. Caregiving artists benefit from the ability to pause, slow down, and work in cycles that reflect their caregiving needs. This flexibility empowers them to take creative risks, show up fully in their work, and produce art that reflects the complexity of their lived experience.

Wherever limiting criteria continue to exist, they should always be communicated clearly and honestly. Flexibility empowers them to take creative risks, bring their full selves to their work, and produce art that reflects the complexity of their lived experience.

Integrated Spaces for Families

Physical and digital work spaces* must be designed to include families. This could mean family rooms, play areas, soft seating zones, or quiet corners within residencies, studios, exhibitions, or conferences. Outdoor areas, corridors, or foyers can be activated as spaces for movement and participation, breaking away from static attendance. Where possible, facilitators or staff can be engaged to support children, offering moments of supported care that allow artists to focus. In exhibition settings, craft resources and engagement prompts can ensure children are not sidelined, but welcomed into the creative environment. These small shifts signal that care and creativity do not exist in opposition, but can coexist within the same environment.

Visibility, Community and Narrative Shifts

Artist-parents often face both isolation and invisibility. Mainstream representation of artists, as well as dominant career models based in linear progression and constant output, inherently exclude those living with care responsibilities. As a result, alternative models should make space for ambiguity, complexity, and nonlinear *growth.

It is also crucial to spotlight, archive, and champion work developed by caregiving artists. With greater visibility, the wider public perception of artistic life expands to include different timelines and trajectories. Visibility is not just about career development, it is about recognition, validation, and rewriting narratives around what an artist can look like. Artists should not be intended as producers of artworks, but be supported as whole humans who navigate the pursuit of creation, caregiving, grief, joy, and change. 

To reduce isolation, digital private views, hybrid exhibitions, and online networking can create opportunities for connection even when attendance in person is not possible. Networks that bridge art, wellbeing, mental health, and trauma-informed practices ensure that the conditions sustaining creativity are acknowledged and supported. Collective support can strengthen this further: peer exchange, mentoring, and intergenerational programming are vital forms of community care. 

Find in the handbook: Integrated Care Access Rider Guidelines for artists and organisers + Integrated Care Access Rider + Ready-to-use Template, Easy-to-read Summary.