No Funding
Here’s a post I wrote a couple of months ago but must I must have failed to click the final ‘post’ button as I reliased it hadn’t gone live.
If you’ve read some of my earlier posts then you may have seen that my mentor Gill Park, from Pavilion, assisted me to put in an application for Arts Council funding. The bad news is, I didn’t get it. Frustratingly the feedback was that within my application all criteria were ‘strongly met’ but there is just too much competition for funds at the moment. So I am taking stock and thinking about putting in another application. However it will have to be revised since a lot of what was included in this one was time based and including support-in-kind that has now passed. So I need to put some more support and opportunities in place before applying again.
Over the period of this bursary, I feel as if I’ve made quite a lot of progress with my work and some decisions about focussing more on developing some new work in print, artists books and video. This is as an alternative to the route I was tending down over the past couple of years of making temporary site-responsive commissions and projects with a participatory element. This is still something I am interested in and a way I will continue to work if the right opportunity arises. But it has felt good to spend some time on my own in the studio without the pressure of specific commissions. I have made some new work for a recent exhibition in Leeds and Ghent and made a couple of videos which I am now touting around various places (and there are more video ideas in the pipeline). Importantly the work hasn’t been defined by these particular exhibition opportunities and it is work that could be exhibited again elsewhere. I am also making things that are potentially saleable, which I haven’t done before. I guess in the long term I am trying to diversify the way that I work so there is potential to have my work seen in lots more ways (publications, video screenings, exhibitions as well as temporary projects). Also I hope that this will diversify the way that I can make income from my work. But at the moment it has meant stopping earning for a little while which has been quite unnerving. Without getting some arts council funding it’s hard to see exactly how I will get any income from my work in the near future. I feel like I need another a-n bursary to talk to people specifically about fundraising and selling work!
