Think this starts on 26th? Today being 23 that means I will be starting Friday? OK I jsut checked its the 24th, starts tomorrow. They asked in email:
What does the word SPACE mean for you? •How would you use SPACE? •And what do you want to MAKE SPACE for?
SO considering these: Obviously I am constrantly trying to make space and to validate the time I spend and need to make work. My situation w my kids means that finding the time and space to make work has to be considered stategically each day. I have to plan for it. At present during covid the only answer is to get up early and have a couple of hours to myself. The needs of my kids take over after that. Before there was time every morning while they were at school to think and take time to try things out. Now I do my thinking whilst engaged in domestic tasks and home schooling. I try to write down ideas into a notebook that I keep around. I’m not the first artist to be time challenged. I try and think about what I can do within the time I have. Best advice I ever got was from a guest tutor on my masters last year who said to me ‘it doesnt matter to the world if you make work or not. The world will be unlikely to be irrevocably changed by whehter you make work or not. You need to decide yourself if you are going to do it and just do it. You need a tremendous amount of energy and motovation to PUSH work out into the world. Its not easy”. This might seem obvious but it was tremendously helpful to me. It was an admittance that making work is NOT easy, that the energy needed to make, and then communicate the work, is often consuming. So I’m going to make this insta residency all about my daily effort to dig out the space to make work, and the pay it forward ideology I work by. Everything I make and do is because I want to make it and consider it worth the creative and physcial energy required to execute it. I also make it because I have sufficient ego to consider it to be good work. It seems to me that other artists get funding first and make the work after. I see posts saying things like ‘great to be supported by the arts council ireland and such and such gallery’. So far I have not been very good at this, ha ha! so my feeling is rather than NOT make the work because my efforts to secure funding have by and large been unsucessful, make the work anyway, push it out by whatevermeans possible. Its just about finding a way!
So the making space insta thingy needs to be about the ways in which I am finding the time and creative space to make the work, and the process of finding a way to make it take up space, to put it out there into the world.
