Success! My website is back online! After a whole week of fiddling with settings I don't fully understand, it is finally working again! For all of 10 minutes I felt like I'd overcome my technical inabilities, until I realised that it was my fault the website had crashed in the first place. I've no idea why I originally thought the nameservers had to be changed, or why it took me so long to work up the courage to change them back again.
While all this has been going on, Beacon have been waiting to hear if the Arts Council will provide funding in time to use for the Venice Biennale Pavilion and the East Midlands Off-Site Project. This means that, after months of hard work, a successful funding application and some fantastic ideas, the two events may not go ahead. It's incredible how far forward you need to plan for these events: the second event is in September but even if the funding comes through in April it will be too late as venues need deposits, artists need commission fees and so on.
After the excitement of helping Beacon at the Brown Mountain Festival in October, I have been really looking forward to helping in Venice. Dan and I will have been working part-time towards the finished project for around 8 months but Nicola and John, the directors, will have put even more into it. We anxiously await the Arts Council's decision with vague talk of Venice sideshow events on severely reduced budgets.
On Thursday, however, Nicola drove us around potential sites for the offsite project. It was a beautiful winter day and the sites were amazing – one was a church on top of a hill that was carved into a cliff by a huge quarry at its base, providing a view over the whole valley. With that in mind, it would be a shame to have to delay the Venice Pavilion but at least we could adjust the East Midlands project so that people could still experience these locations and specially commissioned contemporary art.
And so it seems that I only feel inspired to write this blog as a form of…I hesitate to use the word therapy here…avoiding the bitter cold of my studios isolates negative thoughts towards art that human contact dispels.
I've spent the day performing mind-numbing admin tasks and panicking over which direction I should be taking to have "an art career" when I should have been volunteering at Surface Gallery or creating artwork. Perhaps the secret to achieving things is not to dream about the outcome but to keep doing the small actions until one day you realise you have become an expert in something you enjoy…or perhaps its something much, much more cynical to do with networking events and well-placed contacts. Is is possible to be a successful artist by spending the winter wrapped up in a duvet? Maybe one day I'll lose weight by continuing my office-induced diet of biscuits too.
But enough cynicism for today – if nothing else I will get my bloody website running tonight, or at least e-mail the technician and beg for help.
Tomorrow is Beacon Day and I haven't found one sponsor this week, despite e-mailing every solicitor in Derbyshire! I felt sure there was a law against such blatent use of copy and paste so I tried to make each e-mail sound individual but perhaps I was less subtle than I had thought? Gathering sponsors is surprisingly hard, even with the knowledge of the previous 4 year's sponsors.
To add to the current feelings of failure, my website is stubbornly refusing to work. After much technical faffing, I decided to upgrade my free package to one that would stop the enormous orange Doritos ad from ruining my carefully selected colour scheme but this has somehow destroyed the set-up that I put in place several years ago and now cannot remember how to reinstate…perhaps this is not something I should be attempting to rectify this late in the evening after a few glasses of vintage cider!
Its already half past twelve on my Art Day and I've yet to do anything art-related. I've finished a book, cleaned nearly the whole house and thoroughly checked my e-mail but done nothing technically productive in view of the fact that I could be at work, being paid. On the plus side though, bumbling around in my pyjamas definately beats being at work, even if it is unpaid.
My plan today is to find at least one potential sponsor for Beacon and finish my application for the South Holland Open Show. Beacon currently has a few projects in progress – the biggest of which is the East Midlands Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2009, which will twin with an off-site project around the area of the East Midlands Airport. This means we need to find a large amount of funding! So far, I've found some potential corporate sponsors then I thought I'd concentrate on grants…who would have thought there would be so many grants for organisations working with children or disadvantaged groups and so few grants simply to put on art events?! Having lost a couple of weeks researching this avenue, I'll now be going back to companies for contributions, particularly local businesses.
As for the Open Show submission…I had a minor set back at the weekend when I realised OHP projectors were made for projecting images big rather than, umm, small. I've made some A3 paper out of sawdust from a family antique and was hoping to project a portrait of my mum in the style of an old family painting to give me some guidance in making a quick but accurate drawing. The image looks great the size of a wall but that isn't much help! If only I had time to make a giant sheet of paper…or had kept up with last year's New Year's resolution to regain my drawing skills. Perhaps that can be my next project and next year's resolution.
So here is my life as it stands at this very moment:
One or two days a week I spend on my internship with Beacon Art Project, an artist-led initiative to champion rural arts and local, regional and national artists. Although this means getting up at 6am and travelling for three hours in order to arrive in the middle of nowhere for 10am, via the joys of public transport, it is most certainly worth it!
One day a week is an Art Day, in which I work on my own practice. For the last few weeks, this means adapting an idea I have decided to spend the next 6 months working on in time for the South Holland Open Show deadline next week!
I also work three days a week as an administrator in order to build up some skills to help me with the arts admin and organisational side of my practice and internship.
Yesterday, I got the exciting news that I might be helping to organise a Christmas Craft Fair for some friends at Craft Mafia too, so it looks like its going to be a busy run up to Christmas! Having been chronically unemployed in May this is a definate improvement.
