Where We Work: Studios, Shifts, and the Space Between

For the better part of this year, I’ve been without a studio.
Between packing up a life and preparing for a move to Scotland, most of my materials are in storage—along with my paintings and canvas bars. I have one large painting with me, a handful of paint tubes and brushes, and a small box of canvas bars. These are accompanied by an old stool and a rickety garden table, all set up in the half-renovated, furniture-less dining room of the shared house I currently live in.

It’s a temporary solution, kindly offered by my landlady when she realised I had nowhere to paint during what was meant to be just a few months’ stay. A few months turned into six. And though we’re finally moving into our own home in Glasgow, I’ll still be without a studio for a little while longer.

While I’ve had many studios over the years, this has been the most sparse since my college days—when I worked at a narrow, battered desk with just a few photographs blue-tacked to the wall to spark my attention.

That almost sacred space—the rituals, the room to stretch out, the walls that once held my thinking—has been missing.

I’ve found this time both disorienting and strangely clarifying. Because even without a studio, the impulse to make hasn’t left me. And so I’ve begun to think more deeply about the spaces we create in—and what it is we really need in order to make work.

A Place to Work

A place of work is just that: a dedicated space where something gets done. It’s often separate from where we rest or live. An office, a coffee shop, a classroom, a construction site—it’s where we “do,” often in exchange for time and income. It’s rarely questioned, and rarely romanticised.

But an artist’s studio is different.

It may appear, on the surface, to be just another workspace—four walls, a table, tools—but it carries something else entirely: a sense of fascination, mystery, even myth. What happens in a studio isn’t just production; it’s experimentation, intuition, and private trial and error. A studio holds failures. Tangents. Ideas not yet ready for form. It’s less about output and more about process.

There’s a reason Francis Bacon’s famously chaotic studio in Reece Mews was dismantled and reconstructed piece by piece inside the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. Every splatter, paint tube, and torn photograph was preserved—not because the space was beautiful, but because it was revealing. A physical imprint of the artist’s inner world.

What we make, and how we make it, is often inseparable from where we make it.

Making Space, Anywhere

Still, I don’t believe a perfect studio is a prerequisite for making art. In fact, I’ve been learning how to make without one.

Right now, my practice exists in fragments—notes, photographs, memory. I don’t have a proper table or wall or room, but I’ve managed to stay connected to the thread of my work. Even in this in-between, I’ve felt it flickering.

A studio doesn’t have to be ideal—it just needs to function. We need a place to keep our materials, to return to them. A space to house our brushes, film cameras, sewing machines, easels, sketchbooks—whatever your tools may be. Somewhere, anywhere, that allows for that quiet and necessary exchange: between yourself and your materials, your questions, your intuition.

It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to offer enough—space, time, or silence—to allow you to begin.

Looking Ahead

In just under a month, I’ll be making the full move to Scotland from Oxfordshire, which has been home for the past two years. I’ll continue what has already begun—a search for a more permanent space after this long period without. Once found, I’ll begin unpacking what’s been stored away: materials, source images, sketchbooks, and half-finished works—finally bringing everything together in one place, which hasn’t been a reality for me in over ten years.

From years of moving and having belongings scattered across two continents, the idea of building not just a home but a dedicated studio means more than simply having a workspace. It means building a concentrated focus for my work.

Because housing your images, materials, and practice in one place encourages connections to form—ideas to emerge, and old ones to be reenergised. That’s what I look forward to most: opening up notebooks from years past, rediscovering images I once loved and meant to paint but never did—because they were folded away, closed inside folders, out of sight while I remained in transit.

But being without a studio has taught me this: you don’t need the perfect space to begin—just a willingness to show up, with what you have, where you are.

An Invitation

I know I’m not alone in this. Many of us are finding ways to keep creating in less-than-ideal circumstances—between homes, jobs, or seasons of life. If that’s you, I hope this serves as a small reminder: the work doesn’t disappear just because the space does.

I’d love to hear how you're keeping the thread alive.

If you’re in your own version of “in between, I’d love to hear how you're keeping the thread alive.