How Do You Keep Making?

Parenthood, mental health and keeping an art practice going!

What does it take to keep an art practice going while raising children, navigating mental health and trying to make a living?

Watch our recent talk event featuring artists Hannah Perry, Nicky Petrie and Rhys Coren and chaired by Rosie Reed. They discuss the realities of sustaining a creative practice alongside parenthood and everyday life. The panel explore the pressures, compromises, joys and unexpected possibilities that come with making work while also caring for others — and what happens to an artistic practice when life doesn’t leave much room for it.

The conversation was hosted at Quench Gallery, as part of Where Is My Mind?, a group exhibition and season exploring mental health, neurodivergence, identity and the often complicated relationship between our inner lives and the world around us.

Bringing together artists whose work approaches these subjects from different perspectives, the exhibition asks how we understand ourselves when the systems, expectations and environments around us don’t always fit the way our minds work.

Where Is My Mind? is interested in the messy, personal and sometimes contradictory realities of mental health. Rather than presenting a single idea of what wellbeing, difference or neurodivergence looks like, the exhibition creates space for multiple experiences, perspectives and ways of thinking.

The conversation around parenthood, mental health and maintaining an art practice sits within this wider context. For many artists, the ability to make work is shaped by care, money, time, family, access and mental wellbeing. This panel opens up that conversation through the lived experiences of artists who are navigating these pressures alongside their practices.