From Extraction to Liberation: Reimagining Artistic Life Beyond Suffering

Resting with my Roommate at Live Art Ireland

I’ve just arrived at an artist residency in rural Ireland at the Milford House. We are a group of artists participating in the workshop Cultivating Queer Disabled Visions, hosted by Live Arts Ireland. The residency takes place in a historic manor surrounded by vast land and quiet skies — the kind of place imagined for reflection, for art-making, for the romantic ideal of creative expansion. The artist residency model promises space: to pause, to imagine, to reach one’s “greatest potential.” Yet, as I settle into this remote and picturesque setting, I’m met not with the freedom to create, but with the raw reality of endurance.

There's an invisible expectation embedded in artist residencies — that artists will arrive ready to produce, to transform their solitude into brilliance. But what happens when your energy focus is entirely toward navigating access barriers, managing fatigue, or simply locating safety in an unfamiliar landscape?

When I asked another artist how they were doing, their response was blunt: "I'm surviving."

That honesty hit me hard. It made me question the deeply ingrained narrative that great art emerges only from suffering — that the artist must endure pain, instability, or sacrifice to produce something "true." This myth is not only romanticized but also violent. It normalizes precarity. It justifies the systemic neglect of those most impacted — disabled artists, chronically ill artists, BIPOC artists, to name a few.

For those of us living with disability, survival isn't a metaphor — it's a daily practice. We navigate logistics, sensations, and limitations that root survival in our bodies. When people insist that art must come from hardship, they pressure us to mine our own pain for productivity, to turn exhaustion into output. That demand doesn't free us; it drains us.

I've been reflecting on how this narrative of the "suffering artist" sustains a system that benefits everyone but the artist. We are the ones who make places desirable — who give neighborhoods their pulse and who create cultural meaning. Yet, as soon as value accumulates, we're displaced. I've lived this cycle across cities: Boston, New York, Berlin. Last year alone, I moved five times, constantly seeking stability while being priced out by the very creativity I help generate.

This isn't just personal struggle — it's systemic extraction. The same structures that profit from artistic labor also perpetuate scarcity, especially for those whose bodies or minds don't conform to the myth of constant productivity.

What if we stop equating art with suffering and instead define creativity through collective care and interdependence? What if residencies — these supposed sanctuaries — build themselves around accessibility, rest, and mutual support? What if we claim prosperity as a right, not a privilege — as the ground where creative flourishing begins?

Collective liberation requires dismantling the narratives that make artists disposable. It asks us to imagine artistic ecosystems that honor disabled and chronically ill bodies as sites of wisdom rather than burden. It means expanding the definition of creative success to include survival itself — not as a limitation, but as a profound act of resistance.

As I continue my time at Miford House, I'm holding these questions close: How can we shift from surviving to thriving — not alone, but together? What new forms of art, of care, of possibility, might emerge when we no longer have to suffer to be the artists that we desire to be?