We went to the Ian Potter Centre of the National Gallery of Victoria this morning, and I liked the exhibition "10 ways to remember the past". One of the artists was Brook Andrew who printed anonymous Aboriginal faces onto metallic cloth in dark grey, making subtle comments about anthropology, White settlement and racism... quite beautiful.




















The centre itself is quite striking: all strange geometric panels and pierced steel sheets. I like it but it looks quite mad across the street from a bizarre but imposing former theatre which has an odd combination of Art Nouveau(-ish) and Moroccan architecture!













































My god(less) son Flyn infront of a telling piece of graffiti! I love the laneways with their strange mixtures of art plus bill posters...

Melbourne

I'm getting excited!

I'm off to Melbourne on Saturday! Two years ago my last visit to the UK was carefully timed to coincide with Impact 6 in Bristol... and this year I've been lucky enough to get a grant from Regional Arts New South Wales to enable me to go to Melbourne for the conference's first visit to the Southern Hemisphere.

I'm excited for all sorts of reasons: I've never been to Melbourne before; I get to meet up with Ronnie, Caren, Amanda from BookArtObject (two of whom I haven't previously met); I will be able to catch up with Sarah Bodman from UWE in Bristol AND Tim Mosely from Southern Cross University; I'm staying with my mate Willis and his family in an apartment at "Hotel Alto on Bourke" which I now discover is a swanky carbon-neutral hotel (v. posh) AND the programme looks really exciting! I can hardly take it all in... And did I also mention that BookArtObject are exhibiting AND that I'll get to see some fabulous art AND for once in my life I don't have to worry about the cost of getting there and back again? That has been such a relief... thank you, thank you to the wonderful people at RANSW who had some faith in me and were kind enough to give me a Quicks grant. Phew.

The past few months have just flashed by: first the intense effort of getting the show at Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery off the ground, then adjusting to the fact that dearest husband is now away A LOT (probably won't see much of him between now and February, *sniff*), then straight into a full-on recruitment process at darling daughter's school to recruit a Principal while at the same time applying for my TAFE job... and then on into the school holidays and Impact 7 in Melbourne... and so on. It has at times been a bit hairy, and I wonder whether that's the reason why I came down with a stomach bug on Monday and feel as if I've been run over by a bus. I NEVER get stomach bugs: the occasional bit of feeling off-colour, yes, and I do have IBS (not a lot of fun when that hits), but this is something else - completely debilitating and energy sapping. I've spent the last two days somewhat disconnected from reality and feeling rather sorry for myself, but I'm pleased to say I ate something this evening and feel heaps better!

Tomorrow I'm having my hair cut and have one last, big meeting at school and then... I can relax a bit and move on in my head. There's a bit of packing to do, some printing out of tickets and programmes etc., and I'd like to buy myself a little Melbourne map of some kind since I don't have a clue where I'm going (or how), but then dearest husband is catching an earlier plane home than usual on Friday and we're going to enjoy a nice dinner here with friends coming over before I hop on a plane on Saturday.

WARNING - not for the squeamish!

If you're squeamish about meat or you have strong views about vegetarianism then I suggest you don't read this post! Hit the back button on your browser or move quickly to another post... Look away now...





















Why all the fuss? Well today dearest husband and I dispatched our first chicken... and I have new-found respect for poulterers because it took us almost an hour and a half to kill, pluck, gut and hang the bird, and it probably takes a professional about 15 minutes.

I can't say that killing our chickens was ever high on my list of priorities, but we were given an extra rooster by friends whose four eggs turned into four roosters instead of four hens, and he was so noisy that even darling daughter expressed the view that she was looking forward to eating him! Dearest husband grew up on sheep and cattle stations and isn't sentimental about animals. Moreover he made his pocket money ferreting, so he's dispatched goodness knows how many fluffy bunny rabbits in his time... He did the killing, and we both did the plucking and gutting. I've now had my hand up a chicken's backside and it wasn't as bad as I thought it might be!

I don't feel bad: if you eat meat, which we do, I think it's far better to eat meat you've raised yourself. Our chickens are organic and they are loved and well-fed, so I can be confident that we're eating good meat. Rocky the rooster had a good life, a GREAT view, and a very quick end. He's now on a plate in our cool room, waiting to be turned into roast dinner on Friday evening when dearest husband gets back from Sydney.

Grounded

We seem to be going back to the sort of weather we experienced when we first came to Coffs Harbour: lovely days, then spectacular thunderstorms and some rain in the evenings! Darling daughter has been learning about the Norse gods at school this term, and I'd say Thor and Freya just had a humdinger of an argument and now Thor's throwing his hammer around... thunder that was faintly rumbling way out to sea has circled back and I can hear it much more clearly now and see huge bolts of lightning grounding themselves just off Sawtell beach.

It's a mad week - again. I'm in the middle of a recruitment process at my daughter's school - again, and I'm also desperately trying to finish my BAO books and sort some things out around the house and do some gardening. The gardening keeps me sane! Our wonderful vegetable garden is suddenly full of little green shoots: tall, pale green sweetcorn; thick, fat heirloom pumpkins; fragile stalks of leeks and spring onions; determined little red beetroot leaves; and a host of other things as well. I find myself day-dreaming about the garden, and about the garden book I want to make for myself once I've cleared some other things off my To Do list. Do I want a hard-cover book or do I want to make myself a folder that I can add to...? Should I divide it up into the geographical areas of the different beds, or leave it as a stream-of-consciousness garden journal? How many pockets should I include, in addition to sheets of graph paper/drawing paper/tracing paper/writing paper...? So many options, so many seedlings, so many weeds.. so little time!

Ah... here comes the rain.

Would've, should've, could've

I would have spent the day in the studio today, except that dearest husband is working in Sydney during the week at the moment and so Saturdays and Sundays are now IMPORTANT FAMILY TIME. I should have spent time in the studio today because I need to sort myself out, shake myself up and DO SOME WORK on my BAO books, but I really, really wanted to spend some time with Trouble and Strife, doing family things. I could have spent just some time in the studio and the rest with my family but you know, I just didn't...

Instead we all spent the afternoon in the garden, digging, rotivating, and planting! It was glorious.




View from on top on the pile of mulch, just up the driveway from the veggie garden entrance.






View of everyone else working!






Darling Daughter's little patch of heaven!








And a view from near the house, looking the other way...









So far we've planted potatoes, dahlia tubers, dahlia seed, gerbera seed, a climbing rose, a celeriac seedling and celeriac seeds, mixed heirloom beetroot seeds, leek seeds, spring onion seeds, and mixed heirloom carrot seeds plus lots of rhubarb, bergamot and plenty of asparagus. Darling Daughter has the climbing rose in her garden bed: she reminded us this morning that for YEARS we've been promising her a garden bed of her own and so today was the day! After Daddy rotivated it we dressed it with Dynamic Lifter and fresh soil, then I helped her to plant four strawberry plants, a speedwell, some flower seeds and heirloom carrots and lettuces. And in her own inimitable way the carrot seeds were sown thickly in the shape of her name (thinnings will go down well with the guinea pigs, we reckon) and lettuces were arranged in a heart shape. It's a creative approach that I hope I share since I'm planting flowers cheek-by-jowl with the vegetables partly so that the garden looks lovely and - there is a pragmatic reason too! - to attract pollinators, of which we have few judging by the fact that I had to hand-pollinate all our cucumbers, watermelons and pumpkins. Future plans include a hive of stingless native bees.




No, not a vegetable


















And yes, unusually for me (I'm known as a bit of a Luddite) I've also been seduced by technology in the form of my new Windows phone. I don't like having to have a new mobile phone (it seems very wasteful and recycling facilities for gadgets in Australia is still in its infancy), but since we don't have a functional landline it's a necessity and especially at the moment since I've got prospective candidates for the Principal position at Darling Daughter's school phoning me at all hours to discuss their applications... Anyway, my old phone (top right) has been on the blink for a while: there's nothing more frustrating that phoning someone or being phoned and the connection going after 30 seconds. Repeatedly. It turned out to be a fault with either the phone or the SIM card, and as I was entitled to a "free" upgrade I took advantage and ended up with the LG phone you can see above.

We're a non-Apple household and I can almost hear my Apple-loving friends yawning since the number of apps etc. for Windows phones is probably a lot less than for i-phones, but bear with me: I've been having lots of fun downloading various favourite albums from our networked MediaCentre onto my phone, with the realisation that I could listen to Verdi on the headphones while sketching! I tend to view anything related to games, music or videos on any gadget in a very negative light: why would you want to be playing Plants versus Zombies when you could be drawing/thinking/meditating? But even I can see some value in being able to listen to decent music while doing something else... Yes, yes, I'm very sad, but also very excited.

Now what else do I have to do this weekend? Ah yes, that's right... I have to felt a pocket for my new phone. You can tell I'm a Steiner parent!

p.s. great news this week: there's a possibility that the Regional Gallery is going to acquire one of my paper works for their permanent collection... which was very nice to hear. Fingers crossed it happens.

After gardening, the rain

Just as we downed tools on Sunday the heavens opened and we had a massive - and very beautiful - thunder and lightning storm. Some of our working bee friends stayed for a while, drinking cider and watching the storm passing over, wrapped up in blankets on the verandah

The timing couldn't have been better! Since then I haven't managed to do more than spread all my seed packets around and contemplate what to plant and where to put it, spending several hours yesterday consulting various gardening books. The result is a plan of sorts, that will see various interesting and hopefully attractive combinations of vegetables, herbs and flowers, designed to provide a sensory feast as well as a sensible pairing of companionable species

This morning I've been to Bunnings and bought poles, polypipe and netting since the last thing I want is the local wildlife eating it after all our hard work. Yesterday I saw a big fat echidna wandering around near the raised beds and of course we have lots of little swamp wallabies and pretty-faced wallabies as well as the usual assortment of rodents and birds. When we are finally paid some more money the vegetable garden will be fenced, which should keep the wallabies out, at least

I realised, of course, that now I need to make myself a great big gardening book with lots of bookmarks and pockets, durable covers, pages for drawing and pages for writing, pages for making lists and pages for planning the next beds... coming soon, I hope, and in the meantime I'm enjoying scribbling on lots of bits of scrap paper!

A veggie garden in a day!

Do you remember this?



















Last July I was blogging about how our digger driver Pete had flattened out a pad for our vegetable garden, down the hill from our house but in the sun all year. I had great fun marking out beds and planning them and then... the rain fell, the sun shone, the weeds grew and we ran out of money! Although I did plant some asparagus I'm blowed if I know where it is now... the pumpkins came to nothing and we had 3 watermelons and some beetroot among the couch grass and the occasional nasturtium. Ah well - that's what happens if you don't get on top of the vegetation in this part of the world: it gets on top of you!

Speed through the year and we get to July 2011 and - look away now, dear permaculture/rural fire brigade friends! - a sprayer full of Roundup, a couple of weeks of dry weather and a pyromaniac husband with a box of matches. Dearest husband kindly waited until I was off the block to "off" the problems, with the result that I drove back along the main road one sunny afternoon, looking thoughtfully at the column of smoke rising up from the driveway and pretty much guessed what was going on.

I must admit, arthritis and all, it was getting a bit daunting with wild Australian grasses taller than me and mouse spiders lurking underneath so I am secretly a little glad that the "problems" were resolved so quickly. From now on we're going to be clean, green and pesticide-free...





















Earlier in the week I ordered nut grass-free super vegetable garden soil and tea tree mulch, and I bought recycled hardwood planks from the local reclamation yard and lots of carriage screws. On Sunday - a beautiful clear day and not too hot - our gang of working party friends came around at 9:00am and we started putting it all together:













































Friends brought ratchets and socket sets, wheelbarrows and shovels, circular saws and sun hats and we provided tea, coffee, cake and lunch (salad, home made onion and herb rolls, home-smoked chicken pieces, roasted vegetables, potatoes baked in olive oil/salt/fresh rosemary/lemon, and home-cured and hot-smoked ham with - of course! - nice beer and cider). We worked until almost 2pm with a short tea-break, then had a leisurely lunch and worked it off again until we called it quits around 4pm.

8 adults over about 6 hours = 48 hours work = a lot of weed-matted paths, two compost bays made from recycled pallets and star pickets, a weed-matted pumpkin/sweetcorn/climbing bean bed, a rotivated and planted potato bed (I've been chitting the heirloom seed potatoes for a few weeks now!), a rotivated and planted asparagus bed with some added rhubarb and bergamot, and four 2.2 metre long/1.2 metre wide raised beds all weeded, stones cleared, wet cardboard in the bottom and 25cms soil and 10+ cms mulch on top.










































The whole 'working bee' idea is just great: four couple works out about right since it means that if you do it roughly once a month you're likely to get two working bees a year at your place, and it's just a fun social thing to do anyway. So a huge thank you goes out to Taja, Robin, Ruth, Darren, Elsbeth and Linda with added support from the kids! And dearest husband did a magnificent job with the food, as well as the gardening. Toby had a lot of fun too, once he stopped barking at everyone.

A great night

A huge thank you to the 200 or so people who came along to Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery last night for the opening of our shows. John van der Kolk was in the main space, I was in Gallery 2, and there was a group exhibition in between. My dearest husband, who isn't biased in any way, tells me that the most excitement in the gallery was in my space - and I think he might have been right, if only because what I was showing isn't what anyone would have been expecting!




This is not a great shot of part of Gallery 2, showing my slates on the wall and two of the cut paper works







These are the slates: three roofing slates, cut into shape about 150 years ago, then screen printed and incised and gold leaf applied by me




























Sleeping City: 6 hand-cut skyscrapers




Communication Breakdown (crappy title but I was feeling desperate!), all cut from a single sheet of paper
















Dying Words: lino cut and chine colle (two plates)
















I had such a fun evening: lots of friends turned up to support me; Deb Wall did a fantastic job of installing the show, making me feel better along the way, AND introducing my work; and people bought stuff! I sold four out of five pieces that were for sale, and received a universal kicking for pricing everything too low. I need to learn a lesson from that, once the euphoria's died down.

This exhibition has been a long and very personal journey for me in many ways. I can't believe how crazily (naively) ambitious I was in saying blithely that I'd produce an entirely new body of work for this show! Madness, frankly, and it brought me as close as I've ever come to throwing it all in, phoning up Deb and confessing that I'd bitten off much, much more than I could chew. I've learned, though, that I am surrounded by supportive, insightful and intelligent friends and family who have been nothing but encouraging, even though I've been a complete whingy pain in the arse. Thanks indeed to my immediate family and to my friends, who've cajoled me into the studio and ignored my stupidity along the way. In one sense I was right, though: by carelessly saying I'd start a new body of work I did indeed kick-start a new body of work! It worked! What I've got on exhibition at Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery represents a lot of effort but is the tip of an iceberg of work that could easily absorb me for another ten years, which is both daunting and satisfying at the same time.

I've also learned the hard way that I need to have more confidence in what I do and INCREASE MY PRICES! I think every single person I spoke to yesterday evening said exactly the same thing... which would have been depressing except that I didn't think anyone would want to buy anything! When I took the work into the gallery I marked it all "NFS" and only had a last minute change of heart, which resulted in a somewhat diffident pricing strategy, but never mind.

The biggest lesson, though, is probably that I need to keep on doing what I'm doing, week in and week out, so that I DO accumulate a considered body of work over time, in whatever form it takes. Then I will have something ready to exhibit when an opportunity arises, or something to sell when someone is interested, instead of scrabbling around to find something because I don't expect anyone to ask. That's a very different attitude, which I will have to find a way to cultivate. After all, if I don't take myself seriously as an artist, why should anyone else?

Lies, damned lies and statistics

I thought it would be fun to look at all the books on tape I listened to while my scalpel and I cut words out of paper for my Speaking in Tongues exhibition, and I was indeed quite amused: 18 novels on 61 tapes, totalling 94 hours and 15 minutes worth of recordings! And I wasn't always listening to books on tape, either...

I've had a cruise-y sort of day today which was a welcome change: I planted three Wistringia and a couple of Oregano seedlings on a bank outside the house, made a new perch for the chook house, vacuumed my studio, did our budget (not much fun, but I promised myself I'd do it today, having put it off from yesterday because I didn't want to sully our wedding anniversary with the bad news about our cash flow forecast!), and started sorting out paper for one of my BAO books. I plan to make the first one next week so that I can get it down to Ronnie ASAP for the Impact exhibition, and then follow up with the rest of them. Things are about to start happening.






But in the meantime, a new off-licence has opened up in town that stocks Belgian beer! So I'm sitting at my laptop with a bottle of Leffe Blonde in hand, remembering when I used to live in Brussels and thinking it would be nice to go back!

Finished!

A big thank you to Claire Simmonds from the local Coffs Coast Advocate newspaper who came over to my studio last week with Bruce Thomas and - despite my lack of voice and horrible cold - contrived to put together a lovely interview and photo for me today in the paper, advertising my show which starts on Friday!
















At last, after all the blethering, I've delivered the work to the gallery (this morning) and can sit back and relax, at least until opening night on Friday!

I do this to myself every time, although the performance anxiety for this show has been worse than usual, but in fact getting everything out in the exhibition space made me realise it's not bad: it's cohesive, distinctive, and it looks like I've got a pretty mean wrist action with a scalpel.

In my haste I haven't taken many working photographs, but I hope to sneak in on Friday morning with dearest husband and a decent camera and take some photos in situ... which of course I'll post here in due course.

Snivelling shivers, Batman

Geez, I've got a cold and a half. Serves me right for congratulating myself on avoiding the lurgy everyone else in Coffs Harbour seems to have had in recent months... Clearly I should have said it under my breath instead of out loud, because no sooner did we arrive in Wagga Wagga for a weekend of celebration with my in-laws than I started to go down with it

Anyway, despite the snivells I've been working VERY hard on new work for my exhibition and had great fun with a lino cut while I was away. All I have to do now is work out how to print it.

Catching up in Brisbane

We've just got back from a few days in Brisbane, ostensibly delivering various items (motorbike, washing machine, microwave, bicycle...) to Mr P, my stepson, and his partner who now live in swanky West End. But we had to experience a little bit of culture while we were there, didn't we? And by "culture" in this instance I'm thinking of a decent place to eat a cheap dinner, swanky cocktail bars and a great Teppanyaki restaurant as well as the joys of the South Bank.









































I loved being back in a city again. Much though I enjoy living in the countryside, it is sometimes nice to get a blast of urban living. We stayed near Roma Street Parkland - famous in our house for appearances on Gardening Australia with Colin Campbell wandering round it - and yesterday we managed to take a walk there ourselves. It's not so much that we have a thing about Mr Campbell - although he is fabulous - it's more that the Brisbane climate is similar to the Coffs Coast climate and hence most of what he says, and most of what grows in the area, is relevant to us as we struggle to establish our own gardens.





















This trip we took photos of areas in the Roma Street Parkland that we liked, and picked up some ripe palm fruit from a foxtail palm, which I will now have to look up on the internet to see if I can propogate the seeds!

Of course no visit would have been complete without a trip to the South Bank area, with its wonderful architecture and galleries. Sadly, though, we'd forgotten how DREADFUL the cafe is at the Museum. Really - don't go there! Not only is the food crap, the service is crap as well. Too late - i.e. after we'd queued and paid - we remembered that the place we'd really enjoyed eating at is the very comfortable half in-door, half out-door cafe and bookshop at the State Library of Queensland, only a block away... but luckily after we'd dragged Mr P and Ms L through the Museum, the Queensland Art Gallery AND the Gallery of Modern Art we felt able to partake of an extra cup of coffee (oh, and did I mention the cake?) at the Library cafe, so balance was restored to the world. AND I picked up an illustrated "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" for darling daughter and somehow I managed to slip a 3-pack of large blank Moleskine sketchbooks into my shopping basket as well, which was really naughty as we just don't have any money right now. Ah well; too late.































I did love this piece by Jill Barker called Faultlines, 1996, which was thousands of hand-drawn wavering lines of blue pen all the way down two looooong sheets of paper. I recognise that I am attracted to work that seems almost impossibly complex/tedious/repetitious, as if there's some intrinsic merit in the sheer effort that goes into it. I probably ought to ponder this more since I find myself increasingly slaving away over my own work in a similar vein... But anyway, it was an interesting part of a single gallery collection that was curated by Marian Drew from Griffith University. I have sadly lost the note I made of the other works in this photo, but the overall exhibition referenced Buoyancy, and I found it interesting. Marian Drew brought together everything from contemporary erotic Japanese woodcuts to 1930s landscapes, painstakingly wrought on eucalyptus leaves in oil paint. It was intriguing and I would have loved more information on the GoMA website as well as in the gallery.


















One thing GoMA is great at is engaging with children, and engaging children with the art. The gallery is currently hosting a major exhibition of Surrealist work - absolutely NOT my cup of tea - and we went down to the children's areas to see what was going on, and it was brilliant: the gallery walls were covered in crazy images of ink-blot creatures, and there were half a dozen activities ranging from editing the Surrealism Daily News on computer to creating collages with coloured paper or bizarre found images superimposed on old landscape engravings! Clearly everyone down there was having a ball, and my daughter was no exception.






















































The one thing I didn't manage, which would have been lovely, was to meet up with Amanda Watson-Will, newly back from a month in Paris! Not surprisingly she was exhausted, and although we had a last-minute idea to meet for coffee on the South Bank it wasn't to be. We're going to save that pleasure for another trip up to Brisbane, when hopefully we'll all have some more energy and I won't be towing a trailer. Thanks for the thought, Amanda - I am looking forward to catching up with you and various other BookArtObject friends at Impact 7 in Melbourne at the end of September.

Yeeeeee-ha!

Great news! The lovely Annette Eassie from Regional Arts New South Wales just emailed me (on a Sunday! They're very dedicated at RANSW...) to say I am the lucky recipient of a Quicks grant to help me attend the Impact 7 international printmaking conference at Monash University, Melbourne, at the end of September. This is wooooonderful news because without the grant I didn't have a cat's chance in hell of getting there. I am thrilled. So now I can go off into the garden in a happy glow, and dream of metropolitan delights later in the year: the galleries! the Japanese shop! the city! the exhibitions! the shops! (nope, no money for shopping) Be still my beating heart...

A bit of fun

I've posted about a felt music bag darling daughter and I made over on Rhubarb & Ella, but I thought you might like this Vimeo clip of an artists' book made by Bryan Ku which was highlighted on the Book Arts Listserve today. It's a "simple" concept with an elegant execution, and I really like interactivity in artists' books, full stop. I'm not even a tennis fan...

WIM•BLE•DON from BRYANKU on Vimeo.

Residencies

The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things. Of arts careers and grants and stuff, and artists' residencies. Yes, it's that time of year again: the alert from the Bundanon Trust fell into my inbox earlier in the week and in between caring for a sick daughter (just a nasty cold) and packing in the hours in the studio ('cos it's far too wet to be thinking of gardening) I've been ruminating about the whole artists' career thing.

Do they tell you all about the arts career ladder at art school? I didn't go, so I have no idea. I guess even if not, you probably get an idea what happens by interacting with your contemporaries, watching your predecessors and reading the arts press. I've done much the same thing: paid attention to names at exhibitions and in various art magazines, looked at prize winners and generally listened out. I deduce that there comes a point when you are expected to start applying for and getting grants and residencies in order to climb up to the next rung, and I think I'm close to that stage. I've exhibited regularly in several countries and taken part in various collaborative projects. I've sent my work here, there and everywhere and apparently some people now know who I am when they see my name. I don't have gallery representation - to be honest I've not even tried, and don't know if it is what I would want - but I really really would like to do a residency.

Why a residency? In a domestic sense it's a way of escaping normal life for a while and focusing completely on your art. That sounds a bit like I've had enough of doing the washing up and would like a holiday paid for by someone else, but dreams of lottery winnings aside, it's not quite like that. Making art is like being part of a constant tug-o-war, constructing a meaningful space around the interior life that feeds your art while juggling the demands of everyday. It is an essentially selfish activity, and I feel constantly compromised. The muse rarely decides to communicate with me while I'm settled in the studio... instead it sneaks up on me at all hours of the day and night, invading my relationships, demanding attention while I'm trying to attend to other people, delivering great must-do-right-now ideas when I'm at work on other things. I am hardly unique in this, it must be the plaint of artists through history. But the lure of a residency for me is partly the allure of dedicated time in which to be completely selfish about making art.

It is also the allure of being part of something bigger: residencies give a glimpse of other lives and new possibilities, they connect you with new people who - perhaps - understand what you're talking about. There is a chance to get involved with collaborative work or artistic exchange, and the chance to make friends and talk. It seems to me that residencies have the power to accelerate your progress by presenting challenges and opportunities at a point when you are separated from the 'no'-ness of normal life.

If I apply for the Bundanon Trust residencies again this year (note the "if") it will be my third or fourth attempt. My poor atrophied brain cells can't remember. Is it worth the attempt? I think the statistic of "1 in 4" applications accepted is bandied around somewhere on the blurb or the website, but I wonder whether in reality the odds are stacked. I'd always been quite optimistic about applying... until I read an article by Deborah Ely, the CEO of the Bundanon Trust, in the March 2011 NAVA Quarterly magazine in which she said that "the residency program is premised upon the seriousness and calibre of selected artists" and "the majority of artists have visible careers nationally and/or internationally". Oh dear. Possibly a big profile in Coffs Harbour isn't visible or serious enough...

Another residency opportunity popped into my inbox last night, from Asialink which is administered by the University of Melbourne. About 40 Australian artists are placed in various Asian countries each year, and the programme sounds fabulous. I've talked to dearest husband about the possibility - wildly unlikely! - that I might be off to Malaysia for a couple of months next year and he was very cool about the whole thing: it's probably manageable as long as he and darling daughter could come over for a week or so in the middle, which is fine by me. But again, how likely is it? Answer: not very.

From a funder's point of view it obviously makes sense to poke money at young, energetic, up-and-coming artists who are all into cutting edge/inter-disciplinary/contemporary art making. They've got years ahead of them in which to make their mark on the art world and for their resume to trumpet the inspired confidence of an early grant-maker or residency organisation. I find myself rather glumly surveying my own prospects: gallery representation? Not likely in the near future, I think. Big competition win? It would help if I'd entered a big competition recently! Long career ahead of me? Yes, it's possible; artists don't exactly have a retirement date in mind since making art is as much about who they are as how they work. Residency? Well it would be nice to think so. I remember a crucial meeting with a large philanthropic organisation when I was Chair of Spike Island Printmakers in Bristol a few years ago. We had applied for a large grant to enable us to appoint a Director who could take us off into the bright blue yonder, but we were head-to-head with several other worthy applicants when the CEO came to visit me for a chat. Why, she asked me, should they give the money to us? And my reply was that everything starts with one person taking a leap of faith and investing in us: without that element of risk taking we would never have a chance to prove ourselves worthy. Once one trust or person made that leap, others would follow (if we managed the money sensibly) and we would shine. So she did. Fingers crossed that at some point the same will happen for me.