The spirits have been lifted these past couple of weeks by art-related events, topped off with icing and cherry by the Arts Council saying yes to our funding bid for The Museum of Object Research.
By “we” I mean Sonia Boué and myself…
The original Museum blog was on a-n and gathered a conversation about it, a bunch of artists contributed to the discussion and the short story is, over a very long lunch in Leamington Spa, Sonia and I decided it would be great to make it real.
The funding is to research and develop the idea so that we have the tools, information and all the nuts and bolts in place to make another bid later on. This is a large undertaking, larger than either of us first imagined over the carrot cake and tea that sustained us from lunchtime through the afternoon…
Anyway… a few days later, the enormity of the task before us has sunk in. But I tell you what, I am so excited! This feels like a proper thing! We have gathered an amazing team of artists around us, who will make it meaty, meaningful, and most of all, REAL.
We have already started transferring the blog to a more accessible, trackable, website, so please do join in as the conversation progresses.
This “yes” also means I have a few successful bids under my belt now, either as partner and co-writer, access support person, artist, and advisor. 100% in fact. A fact I find truly astonishing. It appears I am quite good at this. Those years of writing for so many formal and informal reasons has stood me in good stead it seems. I can write succinctly and I can tell a story. The news of this success has reached many ears, and a couple of people have asked me to help them in their bid.
So here I am, weirdly, setting out my stall in a market I didn’t expect! Yes, I can help. But my time is my livelihood now, so I must charge. My attitude towards this is conflicted… of course I must charge, artists must be paid for work, skills and expertise, in whatever field they can. But also, I know that artists are not paid fairly, so they are not always in a position to pay for help… but it has to start somewhere, right? And I know that this service is actually valuable. A well written bid can make the difference between paying the bills or not. I know this because that is how I live myself. It is worth putting hours (days, weeks, months) into an application for funding, because then I can work on what I want to, what is important to me, knowing I am being paid, rather than hawking myself about for badly paid work I don’t really want to do… anyway, you know what I mean.
So… among the preparatory work and researching and developing, I am now available for helping with Arts Council Funding Applications. I have a diary, I can do planning, me!
