I’ve just had my project funding bid rejected. After an initial “oh bugger” I feel ok about it. I’m now trying to decide whether to rush in a resubmission, or to wait till spring (it’s a year-long mainly outdoors project that I want to start and finish in the good weather and long days)

I’m wondering also whether I should bother to get funding at all and just do a half-assed unbudgetted affair that will cost me a fortune instead of being paid for it…

Mainly, because I’m tired. Tired of chasing money; some tiny bit of recognition that what I’m doing has value; some rubber stamp from The Establishment that impresses people and backs up my claim that I’m an artist. The difference feeling similar to a writer having a publisher versus self-publishing I suppose… It’s exhausting. 

If I had more money I would just do it myself. A lottery win, an unexpected inheritance, discovering a priceless antique in the loft… 

Sod the Arts Council and their complicated and unreasonable criteria, their unfathomable application platform that actually, really, honestly, just doesn’t work properly. Navigating it is soul destroying.

I’m in “competition” with thousands of hungry young artists that also need the money, arguably more than I do. But being an artist is NOT a competitive sport! We are made to do it, but it puts me in the wrong mind-set to actually do the work.

I have to remind myself that the work is the important bit.

And it’s NOT comparable to anyone else’s.

There are two exhibitions on at MAC at the moment:

https://macbirmingham.co.uk/exhibitions/clare-hewitt-everything-in-the-forest-is-the-forest

And

https://macbirmingham.co.uk/exhibitions/genevieve-robertson

I loved them both, two women working in the woods to some degree, producing work that has some relationship to what mine might look like. 

I have to be honest here, I asked myself “why isn’t this me?”

I know the answers. I’ve not put in the work to build the relationships with the organisations and the curators within those organisations to get me there. And while I’m being honest, I’m not sure I want to. I’m 65 and knackered.

I want to make the work to satisfy my own need to think about the world in a creative way. I then want to create some sort of event that allows me to talk to people about it. 

Sadly doing those things has a huge cost implication that I can’t shoulder without funding from somewhere. So I think I will rest a while, and reapply. I’ve done the hard bit, I just need to tweak the forms and dates and put it back in. 

At the moment though, I don’t think I have the energy.

This has also caused me to think about what I want the rest of my life to look like… do I really want to be scratting about for cash for however many years I’ve got left?

News stories of Universal Basic Income and basic regular funding for artists like the scheme running in Ireland have me enviously salivating – can we not just do this so that artists can just be left to get on with the work?