Project Me

It would be easy for me to stop using FaceBook – I can’t remember the last time that I looked at it, let alone posted anything (probably in 2020 when Supermarket had a greater online presence due to the Covid pandemic). Messenger would also be easy to give up. Instagram and WhatsApp are trickier though.

The issue has come up due to the recent ’opening up’ of ’free speech’ across the Meta brand platforms, allowing users to share “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation.” I find this abhorrent, and wish neither to condone this behaviour nor furnish such an organisation, or should I say corporation, with my content. In whatever small way Meta make money from me – because that’s what they do – and not matter how small that amount, I have to ask why would I want to financially support anything that is quite okay for me to called mentally ill and abnormal. Why should I pay to make myself open for abuse – to do so is truly perverse.

I wrote those paragraphs a week ago. Then on Friday evening I decided to post the image below on both my professional and private Instagram accounts.

As soon as I had done it I felt an almost overwhelming sense of relief. It felt good to state my motivation and action. It felt good to take the decision.

Happy 18th Birthday Project Me blog!

It’s hard for me to think that eighteen years ago I wrote the first entry.  I am not the most prolific blogger by any stretch … I am perhaps the most persistent though.  And now Project Me comes of age … what does that mean?

Someone who I met recently told me that this year they were celebrating thirty-five years of being a designer.  I did the maths and realised that they started in 1990 … that’s the year that I graduated from Dartington … so that means that I have been a practicing artist for thirty-five years! Admittedly there were some years where I was less productive, some years that I didn’t have a studio but every year since graduating I have been actively engaged in visual art as a practitioner, as a curator, as an organiser, as a teacher, as an artist.

Cycling to the gym the other morning it struck me that eighteen is more than half of thirty-five … I have been blogging for more than half of the time that I have been an artist!  That is even harder to comprehend than the length of time the I have been blogging!

I find myself in a position that somewhat echos that first post … feeling that I should be mid-career but am not, and in need of focussing on my own practice.  It’s soon a year since I stepped down as chair of the Uppsala Artists’ Club and I have to say that I am very glad that I did so.  The current chair and management committee have had such a tough year that they have called and early annual general meeting to elect a new a committee, and have proposed that the club splits in two as the only viable resolution to internal conflicts.  The proposal will be voted on at the agm.  I support the proposition, in fact it was something that I mooted when I was chair – it wasn’t something that I had particularly thought through it just seems like a way to enable people, artists, members, the committee, to work (unpaid) toward things that had meaning for them, rather than being frustrated with compromises and conflicts.  I am very interested to see how the vote goes.

Since leaving the club’s committee I have been thinking about how to re-animate Glitter Ball.  Last summer’s micro-residency with Elena Thomas was a great start.  In the autumn I applied for Glitter Ball to be at the Juxtapose Art Fair in Aarhus, 2025.  And I am excited to say that we have been accepted.  On Friday I had a great meeting with one of the fair’s co-directors who I have gotten to know through the on-going conversation between their fair and Supermarket Art Fair (Stockholm).  In recent years … editions? … of Supermarket I have found myself envying the relationships and networks that the exhibitors develop with each other.  As Meetings coordinator my role is to orchestrate exactly these meetings, and at the same time I am not there as Glitter Ball.  So going to another fair, one where I am an exhibitor is a fantastic opportunity to see how Glitter Ball can engage with other artist-run initiatives to create opportunities for artists.

Perhaps Project Me isn’t the only thing coming of age …

I am truly appreciative of the support and encouragement that I have received from artist, curator, and academic Michael Petry over the years since meeting him 2007. Being included in his latest epic tome ’Mirror Mirror’ is an incredible privilege. I’m in a book! A serious proper art book!! And I can hardly believe the company that I am in!

A stroke of luck (technically bad luck but that’s for another time and place) meant that I could attend the UK launch last night at the Groucho Club in London. It was great to catch up with Michael and to meet some of the other artists featured in the volume – and a super surprise to see my old studio colleague and fellow Crystal Palace Artists founder Tine Bech. Tine is an amazing person and it was wonderful to bump into her like that.

Thames and Hudson’s World of Art series was a fundamental part of my early engagement with art, and their David Hockney monograph was my (unconscious? … subconscious? …) introduction to gay art. This adds an extra dimension to being in a book published by them.

I am looking forward to having a proper look at the book … for now I can say that I am delighted that ’Play’ (vhs gay porn tape installation, 2009) is in the ’material’ chapter.

Roberto Ekholm was of course there too – he’s worked with Michael for over eighteen years now! We continued our loose conversation about doing a two-person show – an idea that we have been speaking about since before his pre-pandemic show at Glitter Ball. It’s definitely something that I want to make happen. There’s a nice symmetry with him being a Swede relocated in the UK and me being a Brit relocated in Sweden. The timing feels good for both of us. Although he has been in the UK far longer than I have been in Sweden we are both feeling that a show in our countries of origin would be appropriate and meaningful.

Does writing applications count as artistic activity? It is certainly an activity that artists do … a time consuming, frustrating, and more often than not a fruitless one at that. In the past three weeks I have made three applications: one wonderfully quick and simple; two more challenging – one of which contained a section which until I attended an ’advice workshop’ I had not been provoked by and now I am.

The section in question concerns providing evidence of income for the past three years. At the workshop we learned that our eligibility for the ’artists’ working award’ might be deemed weak if we have a reasonable/liveable income. This provoking as there is no distinction made between income earned through artistic practice and income earned through paid employment unrelated to one’s practice. As a single artist without a private income I have to have a regular to ensure that I can pay my rent and put food on the table, I also subsidise my arts practice from this paid work. This paid work prevents me from being a full-time artist. The income declaration can be easily checked by the award giving body as information regarding income, tax, and assets is public information in Sweden. So someone who receives support from a partner or other family member, or who has non-taxable private income or assets, can declare income earned solely from their practice and in all likelihood appears to be in far greater financial need of the the award than someone having to work part-time in order to support themselves and their practice.

In the modest space provided ’give account of significant variation of income, for example high sales of work’ I have quite possibly shot myself in the foot by stating in no uncertain terms that more than 90% of my income is earned outside of my practice and that I am too poor to be a poor artist … did I mention that having debt precludes eligibility for the award?

Prior to the workshop I assumed that the income declaration was simple to see that you were ticking along and had some kind of economic stability. I had not imagine that it might used to assess ’need’. Where did that Swedish notion (false by the way) of equality go?

I am truly frustrated by these kinds of biases and Catch 22 situations that reasonable artists find themselves dealing with all too often. Frustration breeds frustration … and now I find myself frustrated by the realisation that the administrative staff working with these grant applications are on far higher, far more secure, salaries than any of the awards that they are administering … and certainly won’t have been expected to spend a full working week (40 hours unpaid labour) applying for their job.

The amount of the award has not increased in several years. The advice at the workshop was to think of it as a six to nine month award rather than a year’s – which is how it used to be referred to.

This is my fifth, possibly sixth, application for the artists’ working award. I am not holding my breath … not least because the results are not known until April next year.

The other challenging application is part of a ’course’ … a series of seminars, study visits, and workshops … that I am attending. The application is in the form of an Open Call for a public art commission. There is no actual commission but a few of the applicants will be selected and given a fee to make a ’sketch presentation’ to a would-be selection panel. Everyone who applies will be given feedback on their application – which is kind of the point of the the exercise – to find out why one was or was not selected to progress to the sketch stage. The Open Call was specifically vague as the selected artists will collectively decide the site for the fictitious commission.

Update 2024 11 19: my Open Call application was not successful. I am waiting for feedback.

I am travelling home with a suitcase full of vintage sequins and probably not far shy of one hundred meters of hat wire. There is adequate room for them in my case as I travelled with clothes that I could leave at my parents’ apartment should it be appropriate – it is appropriate.

I am not exactly sure what I will do with the sequins – a collection of reels in a glorious colours: champagne translucent, pale pink iridescent, teal, fucshia, fire orange – I see them on new drape pieces … extensions and developments of the material needs exercise.

I want to be in the studio, to gently close the door to, and to surround myself with my glitter, with my fabrics, with my ties, with my sequins, and my needles and my threads and my pins and my wires … and to pretend that everything is going to carry on just the way it is.

I shall go to the studio, I shall makes things, everything though will change … and that’s okay, that’s how it is … it’s just going to take some getting used to. My hope is that things will change slowly until … until they don’t change anymore … until the come to rest.

And then I will keep going knowing that that is exactly what I am meant to be doing. That that was always the meaning even before I knew how to make things, before I knew who I was, before I knew how to breath