Tales of Precarity from Tim Butcher documents the artist's struggle

It's a question academic and artist Tim Butcher put to a number of artist over four years, portrayed in his new body of work: Tales of Precarity, which opened at Sawtooth ARI Friday night.

A series of 13 co-curated visual stories, the work documents the "affective tensions" artist experience in their practice, shown as a 56-minute film.

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"I'm very interested in the precarity of work today," Mr Butcher said.

"Particularly in the arts it always has been [precarious]; it's about looking for ways to try and to understand it in order to so we can change that situation."

Tales of Precarity was initially conceived as an "Instagram exhibition" as part of a major show at the Tate Gallery in London.

Mr Butcher interviewed artist involved with the Tate Gallery and found many made no commercial work and were wholly reliant on grant funding, many working with migrants and marginalised communities.

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"It's really meaningful work to them, but there's no certainty in it - it's project to project," Mr Butcher said.

Mr Butcher asked about their life history and why they were artists, capturing the responses on film and audio.

"I'd then go back to my darkroom, develop the film and print the photographs," he said.

After repeating the process a few times, he would then co-curate the visual stories with the artist.

"Because it was Instagram, initially it was sort of constrained to five images and five pieces of text that you'd scroll through," he said.

"What this one does now is it overlays the text over the images; there's 130 images so trying to fill this space with just with prints and in the dark room was pretty much impossible."

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Mr Butcher's new book, Creative Work Beyond Precarity: Learning to Work Together also draws in part on the project.

"It's an academic book, but I'm trying to reach multiple audiences because I think it's something that needs to be said at a policy level," he said.

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He said a new national cultural policy called Revive was released by the federal government this year and highlighted eight pillars of how the creative industries in Australia "could invite the world in."

"Not just to get more recognition and more support for Australian art, but also build an ecosystem within it," Mr Butcher said.

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