Celia Richards is an artist living and working in Edinburgh. She removes the notes from sheet music to make installations that I find very poetic and delicious.

Celia Richards: Sheet music with the notes removed

Celia Richards: Notes from The Planets (for Two Pianos) by Gustav Holst

I particularly like her works using pianolo rolls because my grandad used to have one in his garage. He had a big box of the rolls and would let us sort through them to load into the machine. We were always awestruck by the undeniable magic of an instrument that played itself.

Celia Richards: Untitled

While exploring her website, I was delighted to find that she’s also been using stitch on some of her pieces, including this darned pianolo roll.

Celia Richards: Untitled

Celia Richards: Untitled

There’s more of her delightful work on her website and her Flickr pages. Thanks to the Rag And Bone blog for alerting me to her work.

“If you’ve done all your own mending, there’s a heap of socks to be
looked over. Then I’ll show you about darning the tablecloths. I do
hate to have a stitch of work left over till Monday,” said Mrs.
Grant, who never took naps, and prided herself on sitting down to
her needle at 3 P.M. every day.

from Jack And Jill by Louisa May Alcott

I should be sitting down to my needle at 3pm every day but sadly I’m still unwell so apart from a tiny bit of drawing, I’ve not had the energy to make any art. I certainly haven’t been able to start the new series of work I’m planning, which involves a lot of sewing. However, I have been researching mending and darning in preparation and I’ve come across a couple of artists who use darning as an intrinsic part of their work.

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San Francisco artist, Michael Swaine trundles around with a handmade sewing cart mending people’s clothes and engaging them in conversation.

Michael Swaine: Sewing For The People

There’s an interesting video showcasing his projects here. He was recently in Britain undertaking a new project where he documented and darned people’s socks.

Michael Swaine: Darning Socks

That little box of thread and tools just makes me drool with longing - the neatness and particularity of it is very appealing to me.

His way of working instantly reminded me of my own Pin Ritual which uses pinning as a conduit for conversations about subjects like domesticity, repetitive labour and, almost invariably, people’s grandmothers.

Kirsty Hall: Pin Ritual

Celia Pym is a British artist who spent a year darning holes in clothes for her degree show at the Royal College of Art.

Celia Pym: Mend

Unfortunately Celia doesn’t seem to have a website, so I can’t tell you much more about her although you can see more of her work, including some very lovely little ink drawings, here.

Both these artists were found on Treehugger, an interesting site focused on green issues. Although they don’t have a specific art section, they do cover some contemporary art.

Other Darning Links

Prick Your Finger is an alternative haberdashery/knitting shop in London who have a fun blog that often mentions darning. They recently hosted Michael Swaine.

Jerry Barney from Fergus Falls in Minnesota recently wrote a charming post about finding a pair of socks that his mother had darned.

My Front Porch has been darning a sweater, while Kate from Needled repaired some jeans with the help of a vintage book.

I found the diagrams on this ‘how to’ page about Pueblo darning and mending quite delightful.

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If anyone knows of any other artists who are working with mending or darning, do let me know because I’d love to hear about them.

The blog has been quite text-heavy in the last few days, so here’s an image-based post for a bit of balance.

A couple of weeks ago I planted some coriander seeds that I’d harvested from the plant in my window box. The plan was to have some growing inside over the winter but I don’t think it’s working since all I seem to be getting is a fine crop of admittedly inspirational mushrooms!

The compost was obviously shot through with mycelium. These come up in little clumps of two or three mushrooms and they only last a day or two at most before they crumple into nothingness.

Kirsty Hall: Fungi, Sept 08

In these two shots, you can see how tiny and translucent they are. I was sure this would disintegrate as soon as I picked it up but although it was fragile, it was stronger than it looked and I was able to delicately hold it while I photographed it.

Kirsty Hall: Fungi, Sept 08

Kirsty Hall: Fungi, Sept 08

Looking at these I was reminded of the incredible mushroom drawings by Chris Drury.

Here is his description of how he makes them:

If you cut off the stem of a mushroom and place it on a piece of paper overnight, covered with a bowl, it will drop its spores onto the paper in the pattern of the gills. The spore print here is digitally scanned and printed in three versions and altered by changing the contrast in Photoshop. The prints are glued and ironed onto the canvas which is built up in layers of gesso to form a surface for writing.
This radiating pattern of spore lines draws you in as a mandala would, but if you take a magnifying glass and follow one line from the centre out to the periphery then you will notice that each line branches and branches again like the limb of a tree. In making these densely written works this is in fact what I do: I follow the principle of the line that branches, only in densely hand-written words, in inks of different tones, with reed pens of different thickness, gathered from the banks of the river (everything flows here) and which have to be constantly sharpened and dried. The written words are repeated and hypnotic, like a mantra. The words cease to have meaning, the concentration is on the sound. A word that has a good sound is easy to write. It flows on to the canvas. The concentration is on the sound, the shape, the size, the colour, the tone, the branches. The words are the mantra that shape the mandala.

Chris Drury: Destroying Angel – Trinity

Chris Drury: Destroying Angel – Trinity
White printed spore prints and radiating lines of text in white ink and pencil on black prepared canvas. Text reads: ‘Amanita virosa- Destroying angel’

Needless to say, I adore the obsessiveness and repetitiveness of this process! Imagine doing all that writing, and these aren’t small pieces - each canvas is 187cm square. I wonder if he ever makes spelling mistakes? If I was writing something over and over like that, I know I would start losing all sense of the words and I would start getting them wrong. It reminds me of the sort of obsessive use of writing that you sometimes see in Outsider Art.

I’ve been a fan of Drury’s work since I saw his ‘Medicine Wheel’ piece in Leeds City Art Gallery. That piece - a circular collection of natural objects collected daily for a year - was a definite influence on my Diary Project.

Chris Drury: Medicine Wheel

Unusually for a well-known artist, Drury not only has his own web site but he even writes a blog. A recent exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art also has an associated blog by the gallery staff and they even have sets on Flickr.

I’m quite delighted by this. I constantly meet artists who don’t have any web presence and don’t grasp why this is a problem: I often end up doing five minute impromptu versions of my articles about how artists can use the web. Many famous artists don’t even seem to have their own dedicated sites. Seriously, what’s up with that? Surely they can afford to pay someone to do it. Hell, if I can do it, surely Damien Hirst can manage it! What’s the matter, Damien, did someone pinch ‘damienhirst.org’ out from under you? I can only assume that they think it’s unimportant or perhaps it’s seen as a bit too democratic or something - I don’t know why it happens but I find it very odd.

So it’s fantastic to see an established artist and a big institution using blogging and the net to directly engage with their audience and I hope other mainstream members of the art world will eventually follow suit. I know lots of galleries have websites but I often get the sense that they don’t quite ‘get’ the web; I think many of them still think in terms of the old models of top-down publishing. Hmm, something else to research and think about…

Katherine from Making Your Mark left a detailed comment on yesterday’s blog post that I’m going to address here because she raises some important points.

[Katherine's words are in italics.]

First - I too would have been very annoyed at the tenor of the comments you quoted. (BTW your link for the politician is ‘dead’). It did seem rather generic and sterotyped to me.

Thanks for alerting me to the broken link, Katherine, I fixed it - see what happens when you write impassioned blog posts after midnight!

Second - the Arts Council has been criticised for its last round of grant-giving and there has been an investigation and a report into the chaos which ensued. The report was published at the end of July.

Katherine linked to the report, which is here if anyone wants to read it.

Now on to the meat of what Katherine has to say:

As somebody who, a very long time ago, used to sit on the other side of grant giving machinery (some of which involved the arts) I can tell you that if there wasn’t a fee to pay to process the grant, there would be a whole load more applications from people without serious intent. The net effect of that would be that they would still need to be processed and that would mean money intended for arts would need to be diverted into administration. Administrators, if faced with this sort of situation, then end up devising ways of quickly scuttling applications to whittle them down to a serious few.

Fees are a crude way of diverting those who aren’t serious - but they generally work.

When I was talking about fees, I was only referring to fees for applying for exhibitions, not application fees for grants. Art Council England does not currently ask applicants to pay application fees but it’s possible that other funders might. This makes sense since Arts Council officers are already employed to do things like read applications. I can see a case for independent funders such as charities levying an application fee if they are in a situation where they’d otherwise be deluged by applications that they can’t afford to process but since I rarely apply for funding, I’ve no idea if it’s a common practice.

I have slightly more tolerance for paying an application fee for a grant application than I do for paying a curator to look at my work, which is what a non-refundable application fee to an exhibition amounts to. In the later case, I think that galleries are exploiting artists as a convenient funding stream. I think it’s a lazy and cynical ploy but artists are often so desperate for exposure that they tolerate it. I don’t mind shouldering some of the costs ONCE I’M SELECTED but I object strongly to subsidising galleries and other artists by paying a fee just to have my application looked at.

Incidentally, if any gallery owners or arts administrators feel they can justify this practice of charging artists non-refundable fees to apply for exhibitions, I’m happy to give you a platform on this blog to do so - drop me an email.

I understand and accept Katherine’s argument that some funders may end up spending all their funding on administration instead of actual funding, although I’d suggest that they might want to address the structure of their own organisation before using fees as a form of screening. Whether I was personally prepared to pay a fee for a funding application would depend on many issues, including how large the fee was and what percentage of applicants were funded. However, from my limited experience in filling out funding applications, most funders seem to prefer to weed out applicants by making the forms long and tedious! Katherine addresses this issue next:

The forms might also be complex - but similarly they tend to test out whether people have really thought through their idea - or whether they just have a good idea which they really need to go away and work on some more.

I agree with Katherine here. Although I loathe filling in any sort of form and the Arts Council forms make me cry, I have found them useful in defining the project that I was seeking to have funded. It can be very illuminating to be forced to analyse what you’re trying to do; who and where your audience is and how you’re going to attract them; what benefits your project will have for the wider community and what your definitions for success are.

Sure, it’s not fun but it can be worthwhile so I don’t mind that. What I do strongly mind is the idea that it somehow isn’t work. I feel there is a definite cultural bias towards anything artists do being regarded as Not Real Work simply because it’s artists who are doing it. This attitude was quite clearly displayed in the comment I took issue with yesterday. Apparently the person in question believes that artists sit around looking pretty and people throw money at them. Hahahaha, if only!

If I design posters, business cards or spend hours on the computer writing up grant proposals why is this somehow miraculously Not Work? If I spend ages working on my website is it Not Work just because I’m an artist? If I spend hours beavering away at something in the studio is it Not Work just because I don’t have an immediate buyer for what I’ve made?

I think this is partly ignorance - most people have no real idea of what artists do all day and many of them would be hocked if they saw the level of detail involved in an Arts Council England funding form or had to wade through the huge tomes of alternate funders with their myriad of different requirements. Anyone who has managed to get funding has invariably jumped through umpteen hoops to secure that money.

Part of the problem is that much of what artists do is speculative and the financial benefits are not immediately apparent or forthcoming. You apply for an exhibition that you might not get into; you apply for a grant because even if you don’t get it, it gets your name in front of the funders and that could pay off in the future; you edit your photos because some day you’ll need them for applications or magazine articles; you make work that you hope you’ll be able to find a venue for… and so on and so forth. So it’s not a simple ‘effort in = money out’ equation and a lot of people don’t understand our motivations to keep slogging away at something that we don’t get paid for. Like I said yesterday, some days I don’t understand it myself! But that’s just how it is. Unless you’re working solely to commission, most artists follow some version of this ‘just get on and make the work and hope the money follows’ system at some point in their careers.

You’d be really surprised how many people want to be given money without putting any sort of real effort into making a good case. Seriously.

Sigh, unfortunately I probably wouldn’t be surprised at all. When I was curating, I received some absolutely dire applications where it was clear that the person either couldn’t be bothered or didn’t have a clue what was required. And I was only asking for slides, a CV and an artists statement, which is nowhere near as complicated as a funding form.

I think that anyone who expects to snap their fingers and get public or private funding for any project, art-related or not, is staggeringly naive but a couple of rounds of filling in forms and writing endless begging letters ought to be enough to open their eyes. I remember talking with one of my tutors at art college and he said that a lot of initially promising projects that he was involved with floundered at the funding stage. Hearing that from someone who was relatively well established made it a lot easier when I got my first rejection letters from potential funders.

Finally, I don’t know any business which doesn’t incur marketing costs to get business and generate income. I’ve always seen time spent on grant applications and fees as exactly that - part of the normal cost of doing business. I don’t know why artists should expect to be let off ‘normal costs’ just because they’re artists.

I don’t believe that artists should be let off costs simply because they are artists and I also regard applying for opportunities as a necessary part of the costs of being an artist. However, the economy of the arts are undeniably weird. In what other business do so many people work for free so much of the time?

Hell, most of us spend money just being artists. I remember reading years ago that the average annual baseline costs for operating as an artist (studio fees, business expenses, materials etc) was about £5,000 - I imagine it’s gone up considerably since then. I have a studio at home partly so that I can afford to be an artist without a part time job yet my costs (art materials, printer ink, web hosting, exhibition costs and travelling expenses to shows etc) still average a couple of thousand pounds most years. And I’m not using a lot of expensive materials…

This would be fine if the arts were well paid and sheer hard work was enough to ensure success but I’m guessing we all know how that one goes!

So - bottom line. I agree with you - lots of artists exercise a whole load of skills other than their talent to try and make art work for them. On the other hand, any artist or organisation which factors in the costs of being business-like into the total equation is far more likely to succeed.

I totally agree and I think that anyone who goes into the arts expecting fame, fortune and everyone to fall at their feet is in for a very rude awakening. As artists we all need educate ourselves about the various financial options available to us. It’s vitally important to work out where you fit and what you’re comfortable with doing to fund your practice. But that’s a discussion for another day because it’s probably at least half a dozen blog posts!