Claire Warden [CW]: Could you briefly explain who you are and what you do?

Jessica Walker [JW]: I’m Dr Jessica Walker. I am a singer and writer. I trained at the Guildhall as an opera singer. I then diversified away into writing, initially for my own performance. I felt strangely unfulfilled creatively and had reached an age when I was confident enough to start creating myself. And I haven't looked back. I then started researching my own work because it struck me that as a classically trained singer I was in a unique position. Generally, classically trained singers are quite passive in their work; they wait to be employed. Given that I was creating my own projects, I wanted to work out what was shifting in terms of my creative autonomy and the agency that lent me in my own career.

I also looked at it in terms of the structures I was working in, how independent artists have become somewhat subservient to arts organisations. So unwittingly I became very politicised in this process. I hadn't anticipated this as an outcome; I was just interested in taking things apart in a practice-as-research process. But I came out the other side completely changed. It changed the work I made but also my attitudes to the nature of work itself: what being an art worker means and how you are uniquely exploitable. It's been a really interesting process for me because everything coalesced in a way I hadn't expected. It made me want to empower the next generation of artists which has led to me working at the Royal Academy of Music in artist development, where the one thing I say to my students is ‘who are you as an artist? That is your starting point.’ They look at me as though I am completely mad, because they just want to go and practise their violin for eight hours, but after a bit of time, they do get what I am talking about. So, I have been on a massive journey over the past ten years from solely being an employed opera singer to doing all these different things.

CW: How have you assimilated the legacy of modernism into your work?

JW: When I started creating work I was looking at why I wanted to sing.