I wanted to write about the mentoring which I’ve had during this process and what I’ve discovered.
The two people I asked – Nicola Shipley, from Grain in Birmingham, and the artist Sian Bonnell – have different roles in their careers. I met with them several times over the time of the support, and found it hugely enriching.
As this support via the bursary has gone on over a much longer time frame than was intended, due to the pandemic, I’ve probably reflected on this more than I would have put in a single blog post describing ‘a mentoring event’. I feel I can more fully say that the purpose of mentoring has exceeded my expectations, and it’s now become an integral part of my practice.
There is the practical stuff – ‘Don’t take on anything else until you’ve done that other thing’ (Nicola)…or ‘Delete that app, you know it’s no good for you’ (Sian). There’s deeper practical work about writing proposals, who to talk to next. And the philosophical stuff – what’s this about, is it a black hole, yes it is.
But really, I found it much more fluid than I’d imagined. It takes time. It’s about relationship building with a person who’s got a professional investment in what you are doing.
Adjacently, I developed a really enriched dialogue with another artist, through WhatsApp. I took this back into one of my mentoring relationships too – a back-and-fore discussion with no interruption. It’s been transformative and I have since broadened this use with other professional friendships, where we are going to use it as a writing gathering tool. So what started as one thing, became quite another. I’d have never been able to afford mentoring for my practice if I’d not had this bursary and it fed into a subsequent proposal for a DYCP grant. I had a better understanding of what I was hoping to get, and then I was able to be clearer of why I was asking for the support in that successful application. So the support from a-n has been critical because it came at a time when I really needed to get a formal structure in place which kept me going.
