Project Me

It feels as though I am caught in a bit of a vicious circle (or is that ’cycle’ – no matter). It is the start the of the funding application season here in Sweden: artists’ grants and awards as well as project funding, travel awards, and residencies, being offered at local, regional, and national levels. Any of these would be fantastic to receive, all of these are vital to apply for. Applying is seen as an artist taking their practice and career seriously – after all why would you not apply if you could?

And this is where I become unstuck, or rather stuck in that vicious circle. I am so busy doing other things that I do not have the time to make good applications. I am confident that an award enabling me to work full-time in my studio would be hugely beneficial to my practice and could easily lead to exhibition opportunities and to commissions and even sales. However the time that is committed to my paid employment and my voluntary work in the arts sector means that have neither sufficient time nor thinking space for my own practice, which in turn leads to me submitting poor applications that are (understandably) unsuccessful.

And because my applications are unsuccessful I need to remain in my paid employment to pay my bills – including my studio rent and materials, and I remain on voluntary committees to maintain some visibility … and then I have neither time nor material to make good applications …

How to break this cycle?

One application that I must make, and make well (whatever that means in this particular context) is the application for an artists’ mentoring programme. Last year I made an unsuccessful application for funding a mentor to me … I wonder if my application might have inspired this new programme (which is being offered by the authority that I made my application to). Hopefully my current situation makes me a good candidate for this professional artistic career mentoring.

It is relatively easy for me to identify distinct areas of my practice where I would like mentoring. And of course I am open for my mentor to say whether I have identified the most appropriate areas or not! My fantasy mentor is someone who works with both public commissions and a commercial gallery, someone who shows in both Sweden and abroad, someone whose practice is both aesthetic and political. The media that my mentor works in is less important than their approach and experience. My fantasy mentor someone who will become both a colleague and friend. Am I expecting too much? Perhaps!

I realise that it is not enough to just want things. I need to do things to make them happen. One of most basic, yet hardest to do, is to be honest with myself about what I want. I can find all kinds of reasons why I find it hard to say what I want – the reasons might be interesting but they are kind of irrelevant. The most important thing is to communicate what I want and to find those who can help me get what I want.

Writing that last sentence made me rather uncomfortable. The words after ’ … and to find’ were hard to write. Asking for help does not come easily to me, asking to get what I want makes me feel greedy, selfish, and egoistic. This is something that I need to get some perspective on, perhaps it is something that will be explored directly and indirectly through the mentoring programme, which makes getting accepted on the programme even more urgent.

In other news …

At the risk of creating some kind of weird feedback loop I want to thank Elena Thomas and Kate Murdoch (and our other guests!) for an inspiring discussion at Tuesday evening’s Discussion Festival. Our starting point was the article that we co-authored about our long-form long-term blogs here on a-n. It was the first time that I have talked about the blog and blogging, and it was really great to speak about it with other bloggers, artists, and writers. It was fascinating to hear other people speak about their motivations and intentions, as well as their ways of writing. The evening gave me a lot to think about and was particularly relevant in the context of wanting to shift and shake things in my practice. Why not shift and shake things here in my blog too?

This post (on reflection) is pretty self-centred and introspective. I think that it follows a pattern that has developed over the recent months (years?). I am excited to break this and other habits!

Where to start?

There are some many threads (wisps) blowing around and I find it hard to weave them into any sort of order. Some things though are making themselves clear … and these things are the result of more than a single event or stream of thought … things are coalescing … weaving themselves together without needing my conscious input or effort.

I need to revise and shift how I use my time. Over the last few weeks I have become bored of hearing myself saying that ‘I do not have time’ for things. Most significantly I do not have time for my own work (a situation which is aggravated by wanting to be at the studio in Uppsala – an hour’s drive away). Thinking about time, often while in the car, led me to consider the verbs that I employ around the word … I talk about …

• Wanting time for my art
  Making time for my art
  Finding time for my art
  Not having time for my art

I was not particularly happy with any one of these verbs. They seemed to abstract, passive, weak, or ineffectual. Then I came to a verb that seems much more appealing – use …

• Using time for my art

This phrase shifts things for me. It makes me a much more active participant in relation to time. Time is no longer something that I do not possess (’wanting’), nor something that I have to somehow create (’making’), nor something out there waiting to be discovered (’finding’), nor something lacking (’not having’). Time is always already there, the vital thing is how it is used.
And I am, to a greater extent than I often acknowledge, in control of that.

All of which leads me to ask: how can I use time for my art?

My immediate response is to say by treating time as a valuable resource, something precious and finite. So I am going to try and be better at valuing my time. Not doing this is what enables me to stick with inappropriate habits and routines – things which use time without giving a result, or even worse which use time and lead to negative result.

My involvement in an artists’ group is one of the threads that is woven in to this thinking about time. I am disappointed and angry with how the group’s recent exhibition was handled. These strong reactions have consumed too much time. I have made the decision that I do not want to use my time with this group any more.

Being around other artists a little more has led to another thread that weaves into thinking about how I use my time. It has been very good for me to hear artists talking about the opportunities they have seen, the articles that they have read, the applications that they have made. I realise that I want to use my time to do similar things. The hours that I use for local arts association, which will certainly not collapse if I am not on the committee, could be put to better use on my own artistic practice. I would rather be making art than making a framework for other people’s art. I have made the decision that I will step down from the committee at the next AGM.

These two decisions are a good start!

If I don’t use time for my art how I can expect anyone else to?

My thoughts are hopping between a myriad of different projects and topics. These projects and topics range widely in terms of scale and proximity: some large and immediate, some large and distant, some small and distant, others small and immediate. If I am honest with myself then I should probably admit that there is too much going on … and that I am in this position, which I am sure that I share with many artists, because the things that I prefer/need to do do not provide an income, so a rather substantial percentage of my week is spent doing something that provides me with a salary. At the same time I think that I might be expecting myself to achieve things as if I were a full-time artist. The reality of having a fractional permanent job is that I can only be a fractional artist … and I do not know how to do that!

I have to remember that these are extraordinary times, and that this is too contributes to the irritation that I am feeling. Or perhaps the irritation is felt more acutely because of these extraordinary times – ’corona as amplifier’ – making me more aware of things that I already felt and knew.

It is almost the end of August – a month that all but disappeared in a flurry of workshops, projects, meetings, discussions, tasks, and deadlines. All of which, save one, would have been far more enjoyable had they not piled upon each other causing some to get crushed, others to be eclipsed, and even those at the top of the pile were not particularly well balanced. Perhaps I am being hard on myself … but I know that I can do better, and that I want to do better, so I get frustrated with myself when my enthusiasm overtakes my capacity.

Needless to say I have not had time for reflection through the lens of writing. And now I wonder what to do with those snatched moments of thought and analysis along with half remembered responses and ideas triggered by seeing so many shows while on holiday in southern Sweden. I think that I need to accept that those moments have passed, and I need to trust that anything vital will still be with me.

I (easily) allow others to make demands on my time. Why do I not allow myself the same? I say that my practice is important but I am not convinced that I demonstrate it.

In addition I find it so much easier to account for my time when I assign it someone, or something, else. I wish that I could shake this need to account for myself, especially as I know that it is a purely internal circuit/monologue – dialogue(?). I am pretty sure that asking why I feel the need to justify and rationalise how I spend my time to myself could keep me in therapy for years.

So do I accept that that is how things are and do my best to get on with it? Or do I put my spanner in my works and see if I can break my machinery and rebuild it better?

A bit of an aside: I wonder if my overly zealous account giving works against me when making certain award and grant applications. Could I be spending too long trying to work out how to justify and account for the award (should I get it) that I put lead shoes on the actual idea or project – that wonderful little spark of a thing that needs love and nurture.

This morning it dawned on me that I might have had the emphasis on the wrong syllable (as my old German teacher used to say). Suppose it is not the listening to the Swedish language on the radio that is filling my head and distracting me, suppose it is the content of the broadcasts.

It must be twenty years or so ago that realised that waking to Radio 4’s Today programme and listening to it until I got to the studio made it very hard for me to create anything beautiful or wonderful (I mean literally full of wonder). It is possible that as I approach ten years of living here that I understand far more than I give myself credit for. And as a consequence the hourly news summaries, the political interviews, and the investigative features of Swedish Radio’s P1 morning programme are having the same effect on me now as the Today programme did all those years ago.

Three, or even ’just’ two, hours of hearing the worst of what is happening in the world seems to take me longer to digest than the twenty-four hour cycle between my mornings. I get caught in a never ending loop of anger, frustration, despair, and disappointment.

Suppose that it is this mind set that takes time. Even if it does not directly take time, it takes my mind to another place from which it takes more time to arrive at that fantastic creative place. The distance is not just between reality and fantasy, rather it is between a particularly dystopic, disfunctional, often violent and or cruel reality and the world that I strive to create in, and for, my practice.

It is time, I think, to stop listening to the radio news … again!

This is not unrelated to my current feeling about my paid employment – that it too takes me too often to places of frustration, annoyance, disappointment, and irritation from which it takes too long to get to places of creativity, fantasy, imagination, and wonder. I hope that this has been the direct and indirect result of the Covid-19 pandemic, and that it will swiftly lessen as things open up again over the coming autumn. That said I will be keeping my eyes open for residency opportunities and will definitely be applying for the ’working artist awards’ that are given here every year … that way I could put paid employment on pause for a while too!

There is so much going on! Despite it being July – month when Sweden is on holiday – I seem to be as busy as usual … so it is just as well that I am on holiday from my half-time job otherwise I would not have time to get anything done.

I love having things going on, however I have allowed myself to get to that point where I am simply running from one to the next without really having time to do anything properly. I do not think that it the first time that I have identified that the problem is somewhat logistic and/or financial. I am starting to do things now that I was not able to do in the last few months due to my paid employment – employment that I cannot afford to give up because most of the other things that I do are underpaid or done with no guarantee of return (financial or artistic).

I know that I need time … that my fantasy needs time to come forth. I want to be better at giving myself time. Time, as they say, is precious and I think that I am worth it. I also want to be better at giving my friends and colleagues time … a course in time management perhaps?

Today – my first official holiday day – has been spent at home restoring some order on and around the table that I work at in the living room. It is a relatively modest table and easily becomes laden with paper, books, pens, pencils, the hole punch, the stapler, the little device for logging in to my online bank account, my diary, a sketchbook, a discount voucher from a supplier, articles torn from various arts magazines. It is the evening and the table surface is not yet clear. The chest of drawers beside though has no clutter on or around it. The floor immediately adjacent to the living room door is clear for the first time this year.

Often I have the radio on when I am at home. Today however the radio has been silent and it feels as though I have had more time. Of course that is not possible and hour with the radio off is the same length as an hour with the radio on … right? Maybe not! Or rather maybe it is not the same kind of hour. I listen to the radio to improve my Swedish, which I believe is certainly does. What it may not improve is my ability to focus in other things at the same time. In fact it seems to have the opposite effect. The radio (or the language) commands so much of my attention that I can complete only the simplest of other tasks while listening. This is where I might be losing time. Whilst clearing and sorting in silence today I found myself thinking about things that I need to do and working through different ways and schedules for do them. As the day closes I feel calmer about my to do list than I did this morning although I have not actually tackled anything on the list.

I feel certain that I will achieve a good number of things tomorrow now that both some physical and mental space has been cleared. I know nothing about the relationship between space and time but by making space I feel as though I have made time. And that is what it is about isn’t it – making time for things.