To carry on from the previous entry, as part of the a-n funded meetings, Helen Sloan came some days later in a rather different capacity. Helen approached me with the offer of mentorship coincidently at a similar time when this bursary was offered and has a particular interest in certain aspects of my work, particularly my explorations into social media and video. The session with Helen concentrated much more on the work itself, formulating a plan to select two or three ideas and purposefully develop them towards an exhibition. We talked in depth about artists she felt I should look at and about how to obtain a commission or funding to free up a large enough period of time to develop these ideas successfully. I found her input invaluable and with a clear plan to move forward we put the next meeting in the diary for autumn when we could look at taking the next step.
I said there were positive and negative aspects of the meetings, the negative were that bringing in two curators so close together with slightly different areas of focus on my work meant that once or twice advice conflicted and each had varying recommendations with regards to other colleagues.
The only other negative was that there was so much information I was a little overwhelmed and it will take a while to sieve through it.
What I will say though is that the reason why relationships have built up with these curators is mostly through the age-old advice of keeping your getting your work out there. Over the past few years I have emailed one or two links to videos/work as it was completed and invited curators to shows without really knowing whether they paid any attention or not. Quite often though, I am surprised to find out that someone has mentioned that they have been watching work my develop over the past few years when I was under the impression that my efforts which is disappearing into the ether. So the one thing to be learnt I guess is to keep at it.
