How to title your blog
Should I admit that it took me a while to start this blog because I was trying to decide what to call it?
This morning, when ‘start blog’ reached the top of my ‘to do’ list, my method was to sit down and look through song titles in my music collection. Other rejected possibilities were You’ve won a prize (by Quack Quack) and Time is the diamond (by Low). The former perhaps related a bit too much to how I felt when I found out I had received a re:view bursary – a sentiment which is expressed in the daft, exuberant music of the track too – but it would be less appropriate if I continue this blog once the bursary is over. The latter is maybe a bit too obscure. I was thinking about how time to reflect and speak to people about your work is a precious thing.The song starts: “if I’m not a lion, and I’m not an island, if time is the diamond…” and I wondered about what it would mean to be a lion or an island as an artist. But here I am diverging (as the song then does). In the end I decided Anytime Soon (which got from a track title by Rachels) stands on its own. Perhaps some of the other rejected possibilities will pop up in later posts!
As you’re reading this blog on a-n, you probably know about the re:view bursaries already. I am really pleased to be one of 25 artists who has received funding to go and talk to curators and other artists about my work. It’s a sort of self-designed programme of professional development. I will write about who I am visiting and why I want to talk to them in later posts. Currently I am setting up definite meeting times with my conversants. I find myself with the attitude of “can we set up a meeting ‘anytime soon’?” i.e. wanting to be flexible and fit in with them, yet at the same time wanting to get on with it, wanting it to be SOON (not really that flexible!). I hope the title words also encapsulate a more general ambiguity I see within my situation as an artist, and perhaps the general state of being an artist. A sense of anticipation and of aspiration but with no clarity as to exactly where that’s headed. Being an artist is a balance of trying to make things happen and responding to opportunity as it comes. The bursary is partially about shifting that balance towards me being more proactive.
