The figure of the artist is often understood as a curious prototype, a signifier of a specific imaginary of the cultural producer and of an intended, often bohemian, lifestyle. Given that artists’ lives are typically defined in opposition to more conventional forms of employment, my thesis takes the treatment of the artist as a progenitor of the contemporary celebration of the freelance worker. The freelance artist is supposedly no longer bound by the nuclear family or by permanent fixed employment and is defined instead by flexibility and fluidity. I seek to outline the ways in which the image of ‘the artist’ both anticipates and is used to legitimise, even romanticise, a now ubiquitous form of precarious employment in relation to a precarious space for living and working.My thesis explores the studioification of the home, or rather the process through which both the home and life within the home, including creative work, are commodified. In doing so, it shows how the alleged informality of artists’ living arrangements, often glamourised in visual representations of artists, is a mischaracterisation that naturalises precarity while concealing the role of both the state and the real estate market in producing such conditions. Beginning with the birth of ‘the free artist’ during the two-hundred-year period in which artists resided at the Louvre in Paris, the thesis traces the development of the studio in Paris, New York and San Francisco, exposing the instrumentalisation of the artist as a figure and of the studio as a space within a broader process that I call studioification.

Elena graduated from the AA Diploma Programme in 2012 and completed the History and Critical Thinking MA at the Architectural Association in 2015. She later completed her PhD at the AA. She has worked as an architectural designer in Mexico City and the UK, and as a researcher at Forensic Architecture. Elena has taught and examined at several UK universities and is Associate Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University, where she has co-led DS7 on the MArchD since 2018.