Not funded by ACE, and a little foggy why

Howler Chaser - Fog at Durlston | June 2021

With budgets stretched to the limit, I am just one more disappointed artist who didn't get her Arts Council funding, but I still want to talk about it. Because I feel there is something wrong with arts funding when so many people put in so much effort that fails to materialise into money -- and all they get back is a curt one-liner.  

In my case, it was a Project Grant of £12,579 to work with Megan Calver at Durlston Country Park & National Nature Reserve in Dorset on a self-directed residency, working title: Howler Chaser. We were planning to look at the architectural and archival traces of a radar signalling system called OBOE, pioneered at Durlston and used in blind-bombing during World War II. This was to be used as a new lens for audiences to view the rich array of wildlife on the site, particularly those aspects that are ephemeral or concealed. Our outcomes included a four-week on-site exhibition and a participatory public event.

Overall, we worked (mostly unpaid) towards this application for about 12 months, building relationships, doing preparatory research and figuring out how to get the best possible results for us, our partner organisation and our audiences. All while dealing with the difficulties and restrictions of a pandemic. Although not all of that work is wasted, much of it is. Rejection always had to be factored in as a possibility, but its impact on my practice, my career and my livelihood is nonetheless considerable. Here's why:

1) In the final stages of applying, I gave up the equivalent of 15-20 days to research and write the application, time that I could have used to earn money to support myself and my practice. 

2) I had to pass up on other opportunities for 2022 that looked interesting but would have clashed. 

3) I wasted the time of friends, colleagues and potential partners enlisting their support.

4) Most disappointing of all, I put my heart and soul into shaping a really good project that I genuinely believe would have generated new knowledge and awareness, and new opportunities for people to engage with art. And now it can't happen.

Perhaps if you fund-raise for a living, you can decode ACE's feedback effectively but, as an independent artist, their decisions process remains almost opaque to me. I can't even say I've learned from this rejection. Despite immersing ourselves in pages and pages of guidance and several webinars, and utilising detailed cheat sheets, we can only guess what it is about our public engagement and marketing that the Arts Council found so lacking. When reapplying after one knock-back, we did our very best to cram all of our enhanced plans into the 1000-character limit, but apparently ACE still needed more detail. Oh, and second time around they revealed we possibly should have included a marketing partner (even though our project partner Durlston has its own well-established marketing and engagement programme, and a dedicated member of staff to deliver it). I am sure there were rational reasons for our rejection; it's just that I'm genuinely puzzled about what they were.

I refuse to see this as a failure. Our ambitions for this work clearly do not fit the funding criteria of a particular government organisation, and we would be wrong to bend too far to do so. But there are other things about this rejection that evoke a real a sense of loss.  

This project cannot now happen at Durlston with Megan. The timeline we had plotted and the events we had scheduled start rolling in mid-January 2022, so there is no chance to re-apply again in time. Neither do we have the possibility of rescheduling for 2023. Both Megan and I now face pressing personal commitments that will make major collaborations such as this very difficult for at least a few years. 

So that's it. We will make use of the material and research we've generated so far to create some kind of more modest work, maybe even a small exhibition. But the project will lose its deep connection with the site and community that inspired it. 

And I will start the new year trying to fill a giant hole in my income, my plans and my practice. 

Unfunded logo from flaneur.me.org