‘I don’t think enough people talk about how much work happens around being an artist that has nothing to do with physically making art.’

Being an artist isn't always about spending your days in the studio making amazing art. There’s the other stuff: funding applications, freelance jobs, networking and the challenge of finding enough time and money just to keep creating.

For artists Rebecca Garrard, Aliya Farakh and Oriana Loucaidou, being part of Manchester's 1838 Collective - called after the year the Manchester School of Art was established - means they don't have to do it on their own.

Cult Manchester’s Katherine Macfarlane spoke to the three women about their journeys into art, making a living and what being part of the 1838 Collective means to them. And we asked each of them to share a piece of their work with us.

Aliya Farakh (@aliyafarakh): I’m a visual artist who primarily works in oil paint. As well as painting stills from horror films, I also use oil paint as an outlet to explore my mixed heritage, my personal identity and where I belong within the spaces I paint.

My journey has been one of stubbornness but I wouldn’t have it any other way. Going down the academic route helped me make sense of it and position myself in spaces I wouldn’t otherwise have had access to, but I know I would've found my way here somehow. No matter what, I always ended up coming back to making art.

CM: Making a living in anything in the creative industries is hard - how do you manage it?

Aliya: Honestly, I’m still working this one out myself. I still live with my parents and just keep being persistent in applying to anything I can. I've recently been successful in getting a freelance job which should help support me and otherwise I've been taking advantage of any skills I have.

CM: I was speaking with female gig photographers recently and they face quite sexist attitudes at work - does this happen in the art world? How do you deal with it?

Aliya: I’ve not experienced much. Painting can be quite a lonely thing to do and when I do surround myself with people, I’m really lucky - often I’m in circles of supportive and kind people.

CM: What does being part of the 1838 Collective mean to you?

Aliya: Being part of 1838 means so much to me! It’s a support system, friendship and an exploration of creativity. It is empowering each other to keep being creative and stay motivated. We're becoming the representation we might not have seen before. Without 1838 Collective I have no clue what I would've done after graduating.

Aliya: This piece, Untitled, 2026 is my most recent and is a still from a 2026 horror film, Obsession. This piece has a direct connection to the reference. I mostly paint women in horror, focusing on the strong female character and the role of intense emotions juxtaposed by bright colourful backgrounds. I enjoy playing with contradictions and creating my own space situated between unease and escapism. Where you exist in this space often relates to the audience's familiarity with the reference material, as well as the way in which they interpret the piece. 

 Rebecca Garrard (@rebeccagarrad8): I’m a visual artist based in Manchester working in drawing and painting. My studio is based at Islington Mill in Salford, where I also co-direct 1838 Collective. My journey into becoming an artist started with philosophy. I studied my undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Italian at the University of Exeter before moving to Manchester, where I then joined the MA Painting at Manchester School of Art.

I suppose I have always made art since I was young, and my return to creative practice was reignited when I started illustrating and painting for the first time during COVID.

When I started drawing and painting more seriously during my MA, I realised that I was still doing philosophy but through another medium. Art allowed me to overcome the limitations of language and logic that prevents philosophy from successfully capturing lived experience.

Art was a more direct way of communicating truth and knowledge and allowed me to access the grey areas of experience and consciousness that words can’t quite grasp.

In this sense, my practice is philosophical, but it’s rooted more in meditation rather than analysis, thought and language. That said, my practice is influenced by the intersection of phenomenology and psychoanalysis with Eastern philosophy, in particular Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and the work of Jiddu Krishnamurti.

Through drawing and painting, primarily in ink and charcoal on paper, I’m exploring awareness and meditation. My work uses embodied and intuitive mark-making to explore awareness, presence, and somatic or bodily knowledge, responding to the peripheries of the known in the mind, body and human experience.

CM: As well as being an artist and running 1838 Collective, you’re also busy in other areas…

Rebecca: I also work freelance as an access support worker, helping others with their Arts Council funding applications. I spend a lot of my time voluntarily writing funding applications for 1838 Collective, as well as working on the business strategy for our organisation so that we can deliver long-term support for Manchester’s emerging artists, with the goal to also pay ourselves for our time in the near future.

I’ve recently just completed a six-week business development course with my co-director Aliya, which has provided us with a lot of knowledge, networks and some funding to help us grow 1838 Collective over the next few months.

I’ve been developing my professional networks in Manchester, connecting with people who can support 1838 Collective which in turn will support local artists. We’re learning everything we can about the entrepreneurial side of being an artist so we can pass on this information to our community. It’s something that’s lacking in art school, and it’s something vital we really want to support artists with.

CM: How do you manage financially?

Rebecca: Like many creatives, I’m often applying for freelance and part-time positions to support my practice but have faced a lot of rejection when it comes to finding jobs in the arts. Nearly a year after finishing my MA, I’m still looking for a paid part-time job. It’s an incredibly hard sector to navigate on your own, but I definitely feel supported by being a part of the 1838 Collective community. In the current climate, it seems you have to give nearly all your time and energy - often unpaid - towards building networks, making work, and investing not only in your practice but in yourself as a business to have a chance of real success.

It’s important to me that no artist should have to do this on their own.

CM: What does being part of 1838 mean to you?

Rebecca: For me, being part of 1838 Collective means standing up for artists and making real change happen. It means being supported and connected to other artists. It means saying no to gatekeeping, building something meaningful from the ground up, and making it possible to have a successful career as a visual artist right here in Manchester.

Finding a studio space, making the work, building a network, applying to open calls and grants, attending the opening nights, balancing a part-time job... It's hard to sustain a practice as a creative person without the necessary knowledge and networks, 1838 Collective means you don’t have to do it on your own.

Rebecca: Betweenness 2025. This work in ink and watercolour is titled after Watsuji Tetsuro’s concept of aidagara. The painting emerged from a state of active observation or ‘emptiness’ – a relinquishing of ego, theory, and intellectual over-determination in favour of flow, play and felt experience. The work is fluid, abstract, and delicately toned, evoking breath, energy and the somatic.

Oriana Loucaidou (@orianalouc): I’m a Cypriot artist based between Manchester and Cyprus, working mainly with textiles, weaving, printmaking and installation. I moved to Manchester in 2020 to study Fine Art, and since then my practice has gradually become a way of understanding my relationship with home, heritage and the women I grew up around.

I completed my BA, MA and MFA in Fine Art at Manchester Metropolitan University, and I’m now continuing there with a practice-led PhD.

I don’t think there was one moment when I decided what kind of artist I wanted to be. It has happened quite naturally through making. I became increasingly drawn to textiles and processes that have traditionally been associated with women, domestic spaces and craft, rather than what we are taught to think of as ‘fine art’.

Being Cypriot has become increasingly important within that too. I’m currently researching Cypriot textile traditions such as Lefkaritika embroidery and Fythkiotika weaving, looking particularly at the women behind these practices, their labour, stories and knowledge, and how these traditions can exist within contemporary art without losing their histories.

My work now moves between research and making. I spend time talking to people, collecting stories, looking through archives and family photographs, learning traditional processes, and then allowing those things to find their way into installations, woven works, prints and sculptural pieces. A lot of my practice is about what gets remembered, what gets overlooked, and how making can carry knowledge from one generation to another.

CM: Making a living in the creative industries is hard - how do you manage it?

Oriana: I think ‘manage’ might be a generous word! It is difficult and I don’t think enough people talk about how much work happens around being an artist that has nothing to do with physically making art. At the moment, my life is a mixture of my PhD, my own practice, workshops, commissions, exhibitions, applications and other paid work. I’ve facilitated workshops with children, families and communities, taken on commissions and freelance creative work, and I’m constantly looking for opportunities, funding and open calls.

Sometimes one opportunity leads unexpectedly to another, so maintaining relationships and being involved in the creative community has been really important.

There is also a huge amount of unpaid labour involved - applications, emails, proposals, research, installing work and travelling - and balancing that with actually having the time and energy to make can be challenging. I’m still figuring it out. I think for a lot of emerging artists there isn’t one clear income stream; you build a creative life from lots of different things and hope they begin to support one another.

CM: Is there sexism in the art world?

Oriana: Definitely, although I think sexism in the art world can sometimes appear in less obvious ways. My own research actually looks closely at this, particularly at the historical division between ‘art’ and ‘craft’. Textile practices have so often been associated with women, domesticity and decoration, and because of that they have historically been treated differently from practices such as painting or sculpture.

That hierarchy hasn’t completely disappeared. There can still be assumptions around textile work being decorative, feminine or somehow less serious, even when it involves an enormous amount of technical knowledge, physical labour and conceptual research.

I find it interesting that many of the processes women have practiced for generations are celebrated as cultural traditions, while the women and the conditions under which they produced them can become almost invisible.

I deal with that partly through the work itself. Rather than moving away from techniques that have been labelled feminine or ‘craft’, I want to give them space, scale and visibility. I use weaving, embroidery and textile processes very deliberately and treat the knowledge held within them as something valuable. I also think being surrounded by other women and artists who are open about these conversations makes a huge difference.

Oriana: Crown Colony 1925 is one of my favourite works because it brings together many of the things I’m currently thinking about: Cyprus, colonial history, archives, textiles and the question of whose histories are preserved. The work takes something historical and familiar and repositions it through my own perspective as a Cypriot artist. I’m interested in how objects and images can carry political histories even when, at first, they might appear nostalgic or ordinary.

Check out the individual artist's Instagram profiles. The 1838 Collective Insta is here.