So…after these great chances to perform of late, I return to re-examining my Escalator project. Where am I in it? What have I done? How is it going? How’s my expenditure looking and where am I going to take the next 4 months of the project?
Its a funny thing really, your realise that when you finally get funding for something, in this case R&D to continue establishing a solo identity, developing new work with Jenny and Ben, raising professional profile, blog and creating a website, that you suddenly feel like you need to be busting your ass creatively to justify your funding, and on reflection the whole point of the R&D time is to not let this happen, this is what happens outside of funding right? When you’re balancing day jobs with creativity and working all the hours under the sun to get stuff done? Well no, in my case I’m still busting my ass, but I think that’s my own problem in not being able to fully manage funded time, its quite, in fact very, overwhelming really, which is essentially ridiculous, because we all know that it is more than okay to get paid for making artwork, that’s what we all fight for right? But it still feels weird when it happens and in a strange way you feel like you need to work double as you would normally to justify the funding, but we forget what we usually do is essentially for free, its hard to make that shift in what you already do for free to suddenly become funded for a while? It’s hard to shift mentally from making work for year’s predominately unpaid to getting paid and its easy then to overlook what you already do!
Don't get me wrong; the funding is great in allowing uninterrupted time to focus on my practice. And of course I’m making more work because I have uninterrupted periods of time to do so, however there’s always a niggling of expectation and the responsibility to do something productive or maybe I mean produce a product, because the project is funded. I guess when you work outside of funding, if its more risky it doesn’t really matter, but, although the funders have no expectations, somehow, I don’t know if its just me, I feel as though I need to do something really ground breaking!
(In two parts due to word count- this needs to be read with next part and doesn't exist without it!)
