Preparing to go freelance & surviving your first year | How to do it | Ameena Rojee
Ameena Rojee is a freelance photographer with a background in campaign production working in portraiture and documentary. Community and culture are the cornerstones of my work.
Ameena writes a regular newsletter 'Notes on Freelancing', to make becoming a freelance creative a bit less scary by sharing her own journey into self-employment.
She also runs 'of the land & us', an online journal for curious minds. focusing on people, places, and living, the journal explores our relationship with the natural world.
Ameena’s advice on how to start your freelance journey:
Valuing and investing in yourself and your practice
I went to the studio the other day to get some books which have helped me think about money and business. I was overwhelmed by how much reading I've done in the last two years. I spent the night unpacking; why have I done that? Why have I spent the last two years educating myself? I have a stack of books around money such as Artists Don't Deserve to Starve, Open Up, The Art of Not Giving a Fuck, You Do You.
So what happened?
Coming up to two years ago, I was working full time teaching, then an issue in that job made me think “I don't want to be part of this narrative anymore”. I decided that I was going to resign in June and I handed in my resignation in September. All summer I had to make this commitment in my mind of “Natasha, you're going to have to make this work”. I made a commitment to make money. I'd been hiding behind a salary, my love of art and wanting to help people. This meant that I was constantly just giving out for free. Essentially, I wasn't valuing myself.
And then I started to ask people to pay me
It actually did take me a while to do that. In January last year I started to ask, "Well, if I'm going to be in that exhibition, I need an artist fee," or, "Great, thank you so much for asking that question of me. If you really want me to give you a proper answer, why don't you give me £50 and I can spend an hour with you?" That made such a difference to me being able to see myself as a more valuable individual, and to value my art more. A whole different section of my practice opened up. Since then I’ve learnt so much about investing knowledge, specifically around business, mindset, and grant writing.
Investing in yourself
In the last two years I've been on so many courses, working with mentors and trying to re-shift my thoughts around money, value and business. I always hid behind my story. I grew up in a family with not much money, we had social workers, bailiffs at the door, my mum always in hospital and I'm one of five kids. I think that I've really tried to un-work and unblock that, because that narrative of where you come from isn't necessarily healthy, and you always feel embarrassed about earning money. One of the main things that I did was to start working with a grants writer, and I started to really start to unlock what I was doing wrong. At first, hiding behind my dyslexia, I thought “I'm never going to get money”, “I can never write these forms”. Then I started to think okay, what is the formula to get this free funding?
Do it now
In the last 18 months, I've got three lots of public funding, one of them up to £10,000. It's been amazing to think about me being investible. That investible mindset has really shifted people getting involved in my practice. I waited so long to see myself as someone that deserves to be valued and needs to be rewarded. I was always that enthusiastic, happy-go-lucky, "Yeah, sure. I'll do it. I want to be involved” person. I had to realise that it was at a detriment of my bank balance and my energy. You don’t need to wait, this is something you can do at any stage.
SOMEWHERE IN WALES, 2019
© AMEENA ROJEE
Just do it
This idea of fear and rejection is really hard with art because you're so present. It's literally a creation from you, from your heart. I started to really work with the fact that if they don't like my work, it's not personal. The fear is of putting yourself out there, so just do it. Test it, go for it and don't hold yourself back. There will be yeses and noes along the way, make sure you enjoy the journey!
A degree of separation
I started to consider putting a degree of separation between me and my practice. One thing I did that really helped me with that is I ran a workshop at International Summer School around personal as political. To prepare for that workshop, I analysed what the value of personal work is, also understanding how personal work can be valuable to others. If I'm talking about my grandma dying, then maybe that's actually helping someone else come to terms with their grandma dying. It isn't self-indulgent. There is a sense of political narrative and universal narrative.
The big word is resilience
The combination of investing in myself, building resilience, and valuing myself has allowed me to step into the space of my voice being heard and making Work Show Grow. Public funding or state funding all comes from the government, so there's bureaucracy that's incorporated which means you have to prove that you are investible. You have to learn to do on that paperwork.
The money workshop
For this course I'm going to talk about mindset and valuing yourself. The grant writing will be the main part of it, but it's going to be interesting to make it a wider conversation because there are so many tools. You can learn the writing style, but I want to talk about that commitment, and the mental commitment to your practice.
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