I have been spending a lot of time recently working on putting together grant proposals. They aren’t easy. I am not one to second guess myself but when you are asking a foundation or organization for a grant of 25 thousand dollars it is hard not to question every thing you write. I well know that the most important thing for an artist and their grant proposal are the images they present, that said I am struggling so much with my cover letter it is unreal. I have rewritten it so many times and almost sent it out a couple times. It is ridiculous because I am typically not like this. I usually dive in and make it work. But writing a proposal is not like making artwork I can’t continually work on it. I can’t erase everything and start from a veiled shell on a new piece. Once I drop the proposal in the mail I am at the mercy of a group of jurors deciding if they should give me a huge chunk of money to make art with: it is purely daunting.
OK now to finish it.
Sweetie Boutique has asked me to stay on for another month. This will give all of you who weren’t able to come last month another chance. It also allows me to be more prepared. I will be showing new Swarm Containers, at least one Trophy and two prints from The Sporozoan Cavities suite and of course the two installs in the display windows.
Come out say hello and check out the work. West Seattle should be hopping.
In all this frenzy surrounding The Swarm I have neglected to talk about work that came before it. I started making these hanging wall pieces when I was in the DUMBO studio in Brooklyn. I had a lot of drawings that I couldn’t seem to finish or I just felt needed to evolve into something else. The Tapestries grew from this need to push my drawings to a new place. I had weaved prints together a little bit, as you can see in front of the wall pieces. I had never pushed the weaving to the complexity and fluidity that I was able to accomplish in these Tapestries.
When we moved to western Mass. I pushed these things even further and they led me to new places. I was never able to finish any of these pieces. Life kept getting in the way. Now we are back in Seattle and I feel confident that I can and will return to these works and bring them to the place they need to be. ( Oh to have a studio again. ) I hope to show them in a setting other than a studio so that I can think at length about their presentation to the viewer.
