What Is (and Is Absolutely Not) My Business.

Let’s clear something up, cheerfully and in public.

Not everything is my business. And a surprising amount of what’s been shoved into my lap over the years was never meant to be.

What is not my business

It is not my business to:

• Convince institutions that artists are real adults.

• Translate creative work into “KPIs” and “stakeholder outcomes”.

• Prove I’m sane before I’m allowed access to my own money.

• Smile politely while systems quietly chew my ankles.

• Treat administrative incompetence as a personality test.

• Stay loyal to a country that treats artists like a suspicious expense.

It is also not my business to be “resilient” forever. That’s just burnout in activewear.

What is my business

It is my business to:

• Make work that repairs meaning, place, and attention.

• Restore things, like buildings, systems, conversations that everyone agrees matter but no one wants to fund properly.

• Notice patterns early and say “hey, that’s going to be a problem” before it becomes a headline.

• Choose environments that don’t require constant self-justification.

• Leave when staying starts to feel like unpaid emotional labour.

It is my business to back myself — calmly, decisively, without drama.

Australia, artists, and the long slow eye-roll

Australia likes artists in theory.

In practice, it prefers them:

• Poor, but grateful.

• Talented, but quiet.

• Visible, but not inconvenient.

• Celebrated, but not supported.

• Inspirational, but never infrastructural.

It’s not overt hostility. It’s procedural shit-fuckery.

Forms that go nowhere (fibre in the bowels of bureaucracy, as my friend Quentin once said).

Safeguards that remove agency.

Systems that assume you’re irresponsible until proven otherwise — repeatedly, in triplicate.

The message is subtle but consistent:“We love art. We’re just not sure about artists.”

Why New Zealand

I’m not moving to New Zealand because I think it’s utopia.

I’m moving because:

• People talk to you like a human first.

• Systems are smaller and therefore less drunk on their own power.

• Artists aren’t immediately treated as a risk category.

• Place still matters.

• And when something goes wrong, it’s usually fixable without a six-month saga.

Most importantly: I’m read relationally, not diagnostically.

Apparently, this is not too much to ask.

This is not a flounce

This is not a dramatic exit, a threat, or a manifesto written at 2am.

This is a fuck yeah.

Fuck yeah to choosing sanity.

Fuck yeah to environments that don’t confuse care with control.

Fuck yeah to backing my own intelligence instead of waiting for permission slips.

Fuck yeah to moving somewhere my work can actually land without a permission committee.

I’m not rejecting Australia. I’m just declining further unnecessary suffering.

Final note, for clarity

I don’t need saving.

I don’t need fixing.I don’t need “support” that comes with conditions.

I need room.

And I’m going where there’s more of it.

Catch ya!