As many of you know, for the past six months I have been building a sustainable studio practice. What I’ve been trying to build is something more like a map of how I actually work, and how the work I do could, conceivably, sustain itself financially within a year.
I want to be honest that the process has been messy, slow, and frequently interrupted by a six-year-old who needs a snack.
I am a researcher and a writer. I make large-scale light installations. I run this Substack. I consult on UX. I am trying, cautiously, to sell small interactive pieces. I have ADHD. I have two little kids. I work, on a good week, maybe fifteen to twenty hours. For years I have told myself that the answer is to focus is to pick one thing and do it well. But the more I look at my actual practice, the more I think that framing is wrong for me. The challenge isn’t that I do too many things. It’s that I don’t yet have a system that lets all those things coexist without constantly fighting each other for my attention.
So this is an essay about building that system. About what I’ve learned from six months of what I’d call structured thinking about my own studio and what it might look like to run a genuinely multidisciplinary practice in a sustainable way.
I have written about effectuation in some of my previous essays. The first step was getting honest about what I actually have and what it generates.
Some Real Numbers For You
Financial anchor: UX & Research Consultancy
$9,000 per project. Infrequent, but proven. The highest return on time of anything I do.
Recurring base: Substack
$2,000/year. Small and steady. Also functions as the connective tissue between everything else.
Proven, repeat: Light festival installations
$2–3K profit per event. I did a piece in Palo Alto last year. This is the most underrated thing on this list.
Early stage: Small-scale indoor pieces
No sales yet. Three pieces shown at an opening. The work is there but the audience isn’t connected yet.
New: Teaching
Not yet launched. Reaching out to contacts for introductions. Low overhead if it lands.
Needs an overhaul: Large-scale public art
Still interested long-term but need to figure out another way of getting more work since applying online has been time consuming with little or no ROI.
Some thoughts about the above
Looking at this laid out, a few things become obvious that weren’t obvious when they were all living in my head simultaneously. The consultancy is the most valuable thing I do by any financial measure, and I’ve been treating it like a bonus rather than a foundation. The festival work has already proven itself profitable and yet I haven’t applied to a single other festival since Palo Alto. And the large-scale public art grants which I’ve been writing for four years without a win have been consuming time that could go to things actually generating income.
