I just want to play with materials and have fun in the studio … but there are other things that need to be done … adminy things and things that are chores … distractions from playing, making, creating … things that play on my mind rather than in my hands!
I’ve not been idle since getting back from Juxtapose. Immediately following was the Res Artis conference (which I attended digitally) – three days of sitting in front of my computer … the good thing about attending digitally was that I could get on with some simple things around the studio while I ’attending’ the talks and presentations … I finished a patchwork (English-piece and therefore hand-sewn) that I began in 2008 in my West Norwood studio! The piece was untouched for several years, late last year I took it up again and made small progress while chatting with Elena on Skype. Now it is finally finished! It’s hardly a monumental work it just required time that until recently I have haven’t had, or rather it hasn’t been something that I prioritised. Fifteen years in the making! That in itself says something … rather a lot! … about my life, my way(s) of working … it is something of a ’durational object’. I think that I will make its long gestation period known when/if it gets shown.
The conference was not quite what I was expecting: ’Designing residencies for everyone’ lead me to think it would focus on, what I now see were my quite restricted ideas of, issues facing artists with specific physical and/or logistic challenges. My views are now, thankfully, much broader and more inclusive. The question of access and economics was of course central but took on various guises which I had not considered. Nor had I really looked at the range of residencies available, nor thought about how they can operate as part of an artist’s on-going and regular practice – I had thought of residencies as the cherry on the icing on the cake … from my place of porridge. Now I see that residencies can be the bread of an artist’s career – a very exciting idea! Something that came up in more than a few sessions was ’selection’ which is of course bound up in questions of accessibility. What took me by surprise was the suggestion of … and enthusiasm for … ’random selection’ as a method of choosing artists for opportunities. The process, as outlined by Jerwood (apologies if it was another provider/organisation – my notes are rather frenetic), simple required artists to complete a simple online (questions raised about that!) legibility questionnaire – which doubled as registering an expression of interest, from that twelve artists were chosen randomly to develop with proposal – with a modest fee for doing so – before being invited to interview where one (possibly more) was selected. The whole process was evaluated and the vast majority of artists liked … approved of … this kind of random selection saying that it was more democratic and respectful of artists’ time. It certainly appeals to me, just think of how many expressions of interest one could register in a week compared to how many time-consuming, imagination demanding, lengthy applications one could make in the same time. If artists were on salaries then spending hours, days, weeks on an application would not be so much unpaid work at the (doubled) expense of time actually making. Random selection seems to recognise that many artists simply don’t have the economy to make appropriate applications (for residencies or other opportunities) which leads to the selection of already successful … or otherwise wealthy … artists. Not only does random selection drastically reduce the amount of unpaid work that artists have to do, it seriously reduces the hours the (usually) paid providers/organisations spends reading lengthy application – a high percentage of which will not … can not … make the shortlist. It seems like a ’no brainer’ win win situation – artists are able to register far more expressions of interest thereby increasing their chances of being (randomly) selected, and providers can spend more time working with the (randomly) selected artists or even spend time developing other opportunities and programmes.
I attended the conference as research for proposing a residency here in Uppsala. What I hadn’t anticipated was that I would even be proposing a selection process/methodology. I would like both the city and regional arts departments to trial random selection for at least one of their awards/opportunities regardless of my residency proposal. Before doing so I need to speak with colleagues who are campaigning for a ’base income’ for artists local professional artists – a large part of their argument is founded on the time spent making applications! So I need to make sure that my proposal for random selection is seen as an additional rather than an alternative way of improving artists’ economic and working conditions.
