On Re-Emerging

When Artists Are Too Old to Be “Emerging”

In the art world we see the word emerging used like a stopwatch. It feels the same as the ticking clock of the motherhood window. If you haven’t popped out by 35, too bad. Missed the boat. Please try again in your next life.

When I started my master’s at 30, I worried I was already too old. Too late to be a beginner again. Too late to be “emerging.” By the time I finished, I was 33, and the same year I became a mother.

It wasn’t my first career as an artist. I’d had one before. But was it over? Am I a has-been? When I finally began to crack out of the cocoon (and I mean this in every sense, because early motherhood is a genuine metamorphosis), I was disoriented. A whole new person, not at all prepared or even interested in continuing on from where I’d left off. As much as I tried. I was different. The world was different. I quite literally woke up bleary-eyed into another life, with a two-year-old, on the opposite side of the world, at the beginning of the pandemic.

What I saw during my time back at art school gave me a clue. I realised I was actually one of the youngest in my cohort. Around me were women in their 40s and 50s finding or returning to art — after raising children, after careers that made more sense on paper, after years of pushing their practice to the edges. I didn’t see them as late bloomers. They were re-emerging. And it was inspirational.

Sure, I’ll acknowledge there were men too (some in their 60s and 70s), former advertising executives, lawyers, accountants, starting over in art. And ok, that takes a kind of bravery too. But sorry, I’m less preoccupied with male trajectories. The system has always made room for their detours, and has long allowed them the time to pursue curiosities, passions, and hobbies that are valued rather than dismissed.

Back to the point, re-emergence isn’t failure to launch. It’s courage to begin again. As life continually does: death and resurrection. The work shifts, the priorities shift, the urgency shifts. A depth arrives that wasn’t possible at 22, or even 32.

Perhaps it’s the timing that has brought this topic up for me again. My daughter went back to school this month after three months of summer holidays, and I can’t help but see myself in her: both of us re-emerging, carrying our new layered, sun-tanned selves into fairly familiar rooms.

Or perhaps it’s what I read recently in Hyperallergic, Damien Davis naming the art world’s obsession with “chrononormativity” — a term coined by Elizabeth Freeman to describe the fantasy (or delusion) that life runs in a straight line, that careers tick along a conveyor belt: emerging, mid-career, late-career.

“If you fall behind, step off, or return later, the system doesn’t know what to do with you.”

As if the interruptions and metamorphoses of life – caregiving, migration, illness, regular old change – don’t count.

But they do count.

They compost. They change and nourish the soil the work grows from. The years we spend away from our practice are not wasted. They are mulch, feeding the roots of what comes next.

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What’s telling (and what Davis’s piece mentions) is how differently these nonlinear paths are judged. Men step away and return and it’s often reframed as experience. Women step away and it’s read as a gap, a weakness, a sign they weren’t serious enough. The interruptions of motherhood are rarely considered part of the work, though they shape it at the deepest level.

Imagine the banality of art expressing only the experiences and lifelessness of a perfectly linear path — a trajectory so steady, boxes so neatly ticked, that the system rewards it without question. Yes, privilege is baked into all of this — socioeconomic, racial, institutional access, the ease of having networks or resources so many don’t. But even setting those disparities aside, isn’t it all just a bit boring?

What if we stopped treating “emerging” as a one-time badge, and instead accepted it as part of a cyclical rhythm? There are many first times in our short lives, and not all of them occur under 35. The first time you make the work you actually mean. The first time you have the capacity to protect that work. The first time you finally claim space for it. For many women, that moment doesn’t arrive until our 40s – when the noise of expectation fades, the limiting beliefs begin to feel inconsequential, and our fucks-given have reached their capacity.

For those circling back: we are not late, we are layered. We’ve tended our soil. We are growing. The work is ripening.