Multiple roles
Developing the ‘Manse’ characteristics I love the idea of a split personality and this represented in two very different looks. Yet again the theme of a mixed identity keeps coming up in my work. This makes reference to my own personal family tree with relatives who lived in India, immigrants we believe were from Portugal. As a child and teenager my darker features would attract positive and negative attention. I am also very interested in how we perform various roles in our daily lives such as mother, wife, manager, artist, educator, to simply serving customers in a bag shop. Although I do love to look at performance artist work, I am much more inspired by the daily performance of everyday life and popular culture characters. It is important for my performance to be more than something that is just looked at. I want to combine my creativity, research, and educational elements into an engaging performance. Could I somehow use alternative scripts, which are suggested by the audience? What if people could write an alternative use for an object from the museum? I see a character split into two people. I perform in side profile two different stories from the Cotton Mills in Manchester and Tampere.
I have my first a-n, Re:view meeting with Lowri Evans in a week’s time to present my work to her. Unfortunately due to her work commitments I have had to push our meeting earlier in the month as I originally planned on presenting to a number of people at the same time in Manchester. However this is not possible so I will have to do individual presentations. With my bursary I want to design a mini portfolio to give to my peers. My lovely husband has recently designed the Joana Vasconcelos exhibition graphics and I particularly like the colour, A4 folded, 4-sided guide. This is the sort of thing I want to produce to handout at my meetings. I have just had a baby and adjusting everyday to life with a new person in the world is taking a bit longer to get back into work mode. Although I am eager to keep on top of my project as art is such an essential part of my well being. Seeing my peers individually has made me realise how I want different information from each of them. I don’t want to bombard each person and I feel a feedback, emailed form would work best to reflect and get back to me at a later stage.
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Re:view Bursary News
I am delighted to have received the a-n Re:view bursary to research the planning stages of the Manse Project 15. This means I can start arranging meetings with my chosen peer group in Coventry, Manchester, and Tampere. The bursary will help me develop a live art project across both performance venues and museums. Having a budget to work with will allow me the time to conduct meetings with Producers, Artists and Curators who can review my past work and advise me on my future larger scale project. Generally my performance pieces are short and seen at micro performance events such as Hazard and Emergency in Manchester. However I feel as a mid-career artist I want to work on a larger scale piece, across multiple venues, which requires further support and proposal development. I want to focus my time on a more ambitious project, which is artist led rather than adapting performances to a brief.
I have mainly focused on talking to performance peers as my arts education has been in Fine Art and I feel I would really benefit from having more focused discussions in the performance field. This award will also provide the opportunity to discuss how a performance character can be integrated into the museum programme and curated at cultural events. Feedback from my meetings in the UK will help inform how I present my work to future partners in Finland. I intend to make an Arts Council application for Research & Development in May, 2014. I have made successful ACE applications in the past, however I was last funded on an artist led project in 2010. This will be the first time I will apply for R&D only. Due to this I feel I need advise from my chosen peers on the different stages of the application process. I hope the research from the Re:view bursary will support a strong ACE application in 2015 for the realisation of the work.
#Marketing Manse
With my project being split between research & development then the realisation of the performance in 2015, I feel marketing will play a key part in raising the profile of my work. I would like to start a twitter feed purely for the Manse Project that will feature research bites and use it to develop the tone of voice of the Manse character. I want to go and see the Tampere International Theatre Festival in August and there is an open invitation to perform at one of the Fringe events called OFF Tampere. There is also The Great Nocturnal Happening across the city for one night only which I could participate in (https://teatterikesa-fi-d.aldone.fi/in_english/the…). This could be a good opportunity to showcase past work or test out the early stages of the development of the Manse performance.
There will be a huge performance audience throughout the weeklong festival of over 80,000 people, which I want to tap into. Could I also use printed marketing or maybe an object to hand out to people with details of how to follow my project? I have been looking at cotton bobbins, which are beautiful, tactile objects even though in the mills if one of them popped of a machine it could really hurt you. I prefer the wooden bobbins to the modern plastic ones. My background was in Graphic Design & Advertising and I love how they use intervention to promote products. I do feel connecting and using a mix of object based marketing, intervention with social media would make my project more accessible to people. However it is important to me that whatever marketing I use is well designed, creative and not an after thought.
I have also received some good news, which I will share very soon…
