There’s a twelve week period between pressing the submit button on an Arts Council funding application, and getting a decision. It should have it’s own name…

I don’t want to work on things I have been working on up to now, and I can’t really do anything for the new project until I get funding. I can paddle around the edges, but can’t get stuck in.

So there’s this state of limbo.

What I have decided to do is a selection activities: 

1. Take a break. Have a bit of a holiday. Days out, see friends and family…
2. Housekeeping in the studio… tidying up, washing things, storing work I want to keep, recycling work I don’t want to keep, passing on materials that might be of use to other people…
3. Changing the things on the wall of the studio to reflect what I might want to do next…
4. Visiting other artists and seeing exhibitions…
5. Housekeeping at home… all those jobs that get put off because the studio calls. A bit like spring cleaning maybe, but in preparation for what might be to come. If I get the money I will be completely preoccupied for a year.
6. Gardening… planting vegetables, collecting and recycling all the plastic pots that accumulate, sweeping, weeding, and also, the bit I like best is on a kin with curating: finding and creating little vignettes of nice things to look at as I walk around, and take photos for my garden’s instagram account…
7. Looking objectively at my website. It’s a bit like my studio, in that over the years things get added, but nothing gets taken away. I’m heading towards another big sort out, but for now I just want to do a bit of an edit, unpublish a few pages to tighten things up a bit first. 

It is in doing the last task, my website, that I come to an understanding about the rhythm of my work.

If I start at an exhibition, and work forwards from there, I have built up thoughts and ideas prompted and inspired by the act of exhibiting. It takes me a while to work through those. I also have made new contacts that I want to follow up, and conversations that need to be had. I do a fair amount of writing in response. A fairly prolonged period of reflection then until new strands and ideas percolate through and start to be made. This can then get quite intense, until I realise I have a new body of work that I feel the need to put out in the world. Then another exhibition goes up and we start all over again. I am currently at the point where I want to start the next big thing, and I would like to do it in a pretty big way, so I have applied for funding again. This cycle takes two to three years…

I’m not quite sure what to do if I don’t get the funding. For the first time I will definitely reapply quickly, but if I don’t get it the second time I will wait until 2027, because I want the start and end of the project to be in the summer. 

What I do in between is open to speculation. I’m sure something will pop up… but I have no idea what it might be at the moment as I can’t think of anything else but the new work. I will have to think of a way to do a scaled down version…

I have been here before, so I must trust the process…