The day after my fortieth birthday I woke up feeling ‘altered’. I couldn’t put my finger on it for a while but for the last nine years I’ve been slowly disappearing. When I was young, dewy-skinned and oozing fecundity I used to write off middle-aged women who complained of being invisible as negative moaners. That was never going to happen to me, how could it? I was full of life and juice; there was no way that could simply stop. How ridiculous! These women should stop self-obsessing and just get out there and get on with it.

So, twenty years later and I’m one of the see-through old ladies who walk, unremarked-upon among you. Invisible. Unseen. Discarded. My usefulness as a sexual being has long past and in a lot of ways that’s a relief. To be released from the stifling shackles of the male gaze has been 75% welcome. However, I won’t lie, the 25%, etched on every Western woman’s psyche at birth that believes you’re only of value if you’re attractive to men has balked, grieved, whined, and thrashed around like a bad actor doing a death scene.

What I wasn’t expecting was to be written off as a person with ambition. When my children were old enough, I returned to uni and studied a degree; intent on training for the career I’d only been able to dabble in while I was changing shitty nappies and painting over patches of Weetabix that had stuck to the wall like No More Nails. I’d done what I could, when I could but couldn’t commit to it as fully as I’d like. By the way, a lot of women ARE able to commit fully to a successful career and raise children, despite what Tracey Bloody Emin says. It didn’t work out for me like that though and it wasn’t until I was forty-five that I was able to go back to school and hone my skills as an artist.

There wasn’t any real ageism at uni, I was treated the same as any other student. Occasionally I could have done with being cut a bit more slack as someone who couldn’t stay until the studios were locked but had to leave early and drive for an hour before going straight into Super Carer mode, but in the main they were pretty good. The younger students were all great and being in your forties is actually beneficial when doing a Fine Art degree, as you’re able to bring all sorts of life experience to the creative table.

Since graduating though I’ve had my eyes opened to the rife ageism that underpins the contemporary art world. With my degree certificate clutched in my hormonally hot hand I started to search out opportunities for 'emerging artists’. What I found was that a vast number of them have a cut-off age for applying. Some of these opportunities are only for under twenty fives and some of them, the ones who pat themselves on the back for being more inclusive, have a cut off age of thirty-five. Thirty-five! I’m surprised they can still lift a paintbrush the doddery old codgers!

I was lucky enough to be selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2014), who really are inclusive and democratic in their selection process. 'Great’, I thought, 'I’m safe here’, yet review after review of the show which I’m part of with other people well over twenty-five, talks about 'young artists’ and 'youth’. Partly this is just lazy, rubbish reviewers not doing their research but that in itself reflects the assumption that all graduates and emerging artists are young.

There seems to be a belief that if you do a degree in your forties or later that you’ve done it as some kind of hobby; that it was to 'get you out of the house’ after all those years of being stuck indoors. That seems to apply tenfold if you’ve studied any kind of arts based degree.

Well the arts world can stick that assumption right up its “Ceci n'est pas une pipe” quite frankly. I studied my degree to be taken seriously as an artist. I trained just as hard as anyone under twenty-five and I also have a whole range of skills that come from having raised a family and walked the planet for forty nine years. My tits might have sagged but my creativity is as firm and ripe as it ever was, if not more so. I’ll admit it’s quite disheartening when I come across these episodes of prejudice but it’s not going to deter me from pursuing my career and it’s certainly not going to cow me into submissively accepting that you can’t begin an artistic career at forty nine.

In most other industries it would be seen as discrimination to blatantly say you can only apply for something if you’re under twenty-five but it seems that yet again, the art world has its own set of rules...I’d be interested in hearing if men feel the same way about going back to education in their forties or if they feel it’s taken more seriously as an attempt to train for a career.