Emergency Working Artist Project Grant FY21
Emergency Working Artist Project Grant FY21
Natural Arrangements. The second iteration of a 100 day project which will combine natural found objects threaded onto various backgrounds, photographed and manipulated into a composition.
Tara Makinen: former-Executive Director of Itasca Orchestra and Strings, musician; Tammy Mattonen: Executive Director of Itasca Orchestra and Strings, visual artist, co-founder of Crescendo Youth Orchestra; Kathy Neff: musician, Director, Fine Arts Academy at the University of Minnesota-Duluth; Ron Piercy: jeweler, gallery owner; Emily Swanson: arts administrator at Oldenburg Arts and Cultural Community; Kris Nelson: artist, teacher; Roxann Berglund: musician; Bill Payne: Professor of Theater at the University of Minnesota-Duluth
Tara Makinen: former-Executive Director of Itasca Orchestra and Strings, musician; Kris Nelson: artist, teacher; Classie Dudley: ARAC Equity Fellow; Christine Marcotte: writer
ACHF Arts Access
Due to the pandemic, I have had limited access to the internet and have had to give up several opportunities such as a solo gallery show, teaching new art classes online, and uploading my artwork to sites that can sell it. Fortunately, a few weeks ago I was finally able to get internet that worked for high resolution image uploads in my home. Now, if I get this grant, it will enable me to take higher quality images of my work so I can sell it online. The thread will also be an investment in this project and future ones since it is something I use constantly in my work. Thus my goal in getting this grant and completing this project is to buttress my current art practice into something that is more saleable for the online market. I am a disciplined artist that has rarely missed a day of creating in my life even through the trials and tribulations of raising children, grad school and becoming disabled. Art now, is more important in my life than ever as I also use it as a daily therapy for dealing with my disabilities. It gives me purpose and a provides a schedule. I follow a daily schedule that has time notched out for creating. I create goals, short term and long term, weekly, monthly and yearly to ensure that I stay on track. Art is not about waiting for inspiration to strike but is best done through the daily regimen of routine. This project is scheduled and will be completed as scheduled.When complete, I will have 100 days of compositions. Because of the nature of doing a project like this, not all work turns into something that is great but all is valuable in further developing a meaningful art practice through repetition and investigation. As a result, there will definitely be a good body of work that will lend itself to strengthening my portfolio, being able to sell online and feature in shows. This will be easily measurable by counting the compositions that end up being great and demonstrating them to the grant committee in my follow up final reports on how the project turned out.
My goal for this project was to incorporate textiles/thread into my natural arrangements and further develop my photography of these finished pieces to capture their intricacies. I left the parameters as to how I was going to do this ambiguous and I am glad that I did because it allowed for more creativity and exploration. I ended up with finished pieces that depict the beauty of sedge grasses that typically grow in Minnesota's endangered prairies. The grasses are beaded with glass beads and couched onto a simple muslin textile. Many people do not see the beauty and necessity of our natural prairies to our ecosystem which is how they have become endangered and I am really pleased to have created a body of work that will tell this story in a beautiful way.