Threads

Hmmm… Today I spent a quiet hour getting to grips with all the things I mentioned in the previous post. I drew a little diagram, as I often do, containing all the projects small, large and ridiculously ambitious, that are lodged in my head. Then I spent a little longer with coloured pens, highlighting the things I had done towards getting them to become real. Some things look scarily close to being submitted, ready to launch, whatever. Other things are laughably far away, and need a lot more research to even discover if they are viable. What I discovered about myself is that I have probably started down too many roads at once. This is probably in a bid to ride the crest of the MA enthusiasm wave… to keep the momentum going.

Anyway, the momentum IS still going… you may have noticed the incredibly silly postal sock project I’m doing with Sophie Cullinan…

www.a-n.co.uk/p/2481220/

… well that is up and running, and to make sure you all take it very seriously, we have a bona fide mathematics person on board. He blinds us with science. In fact he has blinded me with science since he was about 10, as he is my son. He says very clever things, and I let it float over my head a little and I then go ooooh at the pretty diagrams, that explain the flow and growth and networks….. Then I glaze over… somewhat sooner than Sophie I fear!

I also have finished writing that proposal… not telling you what for unless I get it, but it does involve clothes, embroidery and words and music. I am waiting for a couple of people to read it through before I send it off.

The GOING PUBLIC project-to-be with Franny and Julie…

www.a-n.co.uk/p/2133404/

… that’s bubbling along nicely, and we will soon be meeting for the first time, and I can’t tell you how exciting that is.

I also have a little eastern European idea… research ongoing….

And then there’s me and Bo, two very different artists, who seem to have found a commonality that links us, and makes us want to work together. I have no idea when that will happen, but we are both determined it will.

My problem is with the timescale…. As I’ve said in a previous comment, I’m going to be up a certain creek without a paddle if they all happen at once!

I’ve got a few projects in my head, some big, some small, some quite realistic, some outrageously ambitious. But that’s where they are, in my head, some are half typed. I need to get something off the ground before I lose the plot.

Tomorrow I MUST finish the half typed, get someone who knows what they are doing to read it (ahem hem, heads up Franny and Julie) and get it sent off. I think, at the moment, even rejection letters would make me feel more like an artist than this airy fairy state of limbo I’m in. I have to get a grip.

Anybody got any experience with applying for funding for a joint English/European project? Point me in the right direction if you can please!

Please turn away if easily offended.

Oh ages and ages ago, there was a discussion about the derogatory connotations that go alongside the term “Local Artist” and even the picture conjured up in my head is of an elderly watercolourist who’s sold a few, and has an exhibition in the library window.

So if I get a job/opportunity within a 20 mile radius of my home, what am I? What do I call myself that doesn’t put this picture in people’s heads?

This is where the problem arises, because my son uttered a phrase the other day, which I love, but it’s so full of arty-bollocksyness we laughed about it for quite some time. But, in the cold light of day, I think I’m going to use it. Talk not of local artists, talk of EMBEDDED CULTURE.

(*sniggering*)

So I’ve come to the conclusion, although I still eschew the arty-bollocks, that it might be useful sometimes… but then maybe that’s what makes the difference? If it’s useful, it’s not bollocks.

Apologies for 3 lots of bollocks in one short post. Oops… that’s 4 now. Bollocks.

I’ve hung “Are You Listening?” up in school. The children loved them, made up stories about what the adult that made the hand marks was saying to the child, searched for the marks, twirled them and spoke to them. I should have shipped in a bunch of children for the assessment!

Seeing them in a child space, rather than an adult space was interesting too, where they could fit the furniture, and the people surrounding them were their peers.

The adults were interested in varying degrees… one of the cleaning ladies said they were “charmingly weird” which I can live with!

Domesticity.

I had forgotten how much of it everyone else was doing.

The washing machine repair man is here. He is miserable, patronising and has an air of smirky resentfulness about him. But what’s he got to complain about? He hasn’t got a houseful of unwashed teenage boy clothes!

I have a long list of household chores to do before I can even start on the art today. I resent it, but conversely I’m vacuuming with relish (messy, I know) as it is a physical reminder of a return to normal, whatever normal happens to be!

Once I’ve caught up, I will have my Tuesdays and Wednesdays to myself to write, read, make, visit, or just slob about with toast looking at facebook and youtube, catching up on my listening.

So if you’ll excuse me, I have to rediscover where we keep the pledge.