Artist Access Grant

My goal is to ease the financial weight of studio rent during the months I will be working so I can more fully focus on these large, detail-intensive pieces. When I am feeling financial strain, I cannot focus on my work and I get very easily distracted and anxious. However, the opposite is true when my baselines are covered. During my residency last year, for which I also received a stipend, I felt the most at ease, creative, and prolific I have yet in my career. In the month that I was there, I started half of the wood sculpture (the largest piece I have yet attempted), created a first draft of the projection installation, as well as completed work on two other projects. I hope to recreate the sense of purpose I had during my residency. I will know if I am successful in my goals/outcome if I am able to feel relaxed and focused on my work during those four months. I am naturally inclined to make art that is, as described by everyone who has seen it, incredibly tedious. Even as my work scales up in size, the tiniest details are still very important to each piece. For instance with the wood burning sculpture, I will be burning hundreds of divots into each of the thirty or so slabs of wood that make up the piece to create texture and depth. For the projection installation, I will make a few minutes of stop motion animation, for which each second of video will take 12 frames to make. For the cut glass sculpture, I will need to perform tests of an idea that has been running through my head for months, then cut out hundreds of pieces of one by five inch glass to execute it. I know I can do what is necessary to complete this work because I have done it all separately before. But it takes a LOT of focus. I am positive with this funding to pay for my studio rental, I would feel able to complete this time intensive work.