“SAND YOUR OWN GODDAMN VAGINAS” : My feeling about unpaid internships

“Your job is to sand down those plaster vaginas” the gaunt middle aged man snapped at me, flicking his wrists towards the pile of cast genitals on the work surface. I remember blushing and sweating and wondering what I had done to deserve the nasty tone with which he ordered me around. “Of course I’d never let you take the casts, none of the customers would want you pouring gunge all over their genitals, that’s my job,” he scoffed.

I was 20 years old and I had just arrived at my first ever interview for an unpaid internship. It was with an artist in Brighton, and I found the ad online whilst searching for “opportunities.” I was always told that I needed a great deal of internship-experience before applying for a paid job in the arts, so I’d put a number of applications together, and this man was the first to reply. I’m embarrassed to say that I had not checked his oveur before arriving, and I paid for it sorely. His work is an intellectual wasteland, and about as visually stimulating as a scoop of mashed potato.

I glanced from wall to wall nervously, scanning the goose-bumped plaster casts of naked Brightonians, as he berated aspects of my physical appearance and general being. He began with a rambling and self-indulgent elevator pitch about his importance in the UK art scene and then went on to discuss how lucky I was to be considered for this unpaid position, punctuating his points with personal jabs at me, such as my casual clothing, or the fact that I’d arrived five minutes early at the door with my friend, who I promptly hugged goodbye to before entering. “Do you even know this is a job interview?! Is this what you would normally wear to a professional job? Why are you bringing your little friends to a professional setting?” he screeched. They were always very kind to me all those years I volunteered at Oxfam, so I was quite taken-aback to be greeted by this goblin at the gates of sculpture-hell. “Is an unpaid internship different from volunteering for a charity?” I thought. I was confused, was I not here offering to work for free?

After forty-five excruciating minutes, cringing at the prosaic nature of his “art”, I made my excuses and walked out that door, never to go back. It is my understanding that he has had literally dozens of unpaid workers creating his sculptures over the decade since then, many of whom faced so much abuse that they walked out without notice and never returned. “How unprofessional,” he’d apparently say upon realising that his slaves had freed themselves and were not coming back. The key take-away here is that this was a commercial enterprise, without any element of pay-back to the community, and as I understood it, very little training. His assumption was that he somehow deserved to be generating an income from my unpaid labour, whilst giving me harsh deadlines, schedules, skilled tasks and verbal abuse. 

So why am I talking about this? Because that was my introduction to the world of work in the Arts, and I now have a decade-long series of projects campaigning for employment rights in the workplace. What I know now, is that this behaviour is illegal under the national minimum wage act. Internships should be a structured program of tasks which train you to enter the workforce, they should involve a signed contract and you must be legally paid for your time. On the other hand, if you are a volunteer then you will not be paid, but, you will then be allowed to come and go as you please, set your own hours, dress however you want and only do tasks you want to do - and most importantly, you will not be generating income for a profit-making organisation. The law is not on the side of unpaid labour - unsurprisingly…

My artwork A Dangerous Figure : Young and Unemployed in the UK, was inspired by this encounter, and from the countless other unpaid internships I completed in my early 20s. Thankfully this artwork turned out to be my first major solo show, exhibited in Somerset House, funded by O2, archived in the National Portrait Gallery, and covered in Frieze Magazine, Art Monthly, The verge, Timeout and others. It served to shut down many unpaid internships in London, and with my newly formed studio, The Bite Back Movement, spawned sister projects such as A Hidden Face, and The Butterflies of Andokbul.

So all I have left to say to that artist is this, “thanks for the inspiration, and sand-down your own goddamn vaginas.”