Image: OMG by Ontroerend Goed, one of the companies visited with Dunstan’s ArtStart grant.
The beginning of my ArtStart year was bittersweet. I was notified of the success of my application a week after the Australia Council for the Arts announced that the program would not be offered in the future, as part of its strategy to “manage” the cuts handed down in the 2015-16 Federal Budget.
Read: Shock funding cancellations due to AusCo Federal Budget 2015 arts cuts
My initial relief quickly mixed with disappointment for those who had missed out and would not be able to apply again, including my housemate at the time. The rhetoric around the cuts also didn’t help and a particularly inflammatory article by the Daily Telegraph sticks in my mind. It drew attention to an ArtStart recipient who had used the grant to travel overseas, implying this was nothing more than a taxpayer-funded holiday. Considering one of my four proposed activities involved a trip to Europe, not to mention the fact I’m a taxpayer, I felt a great responsibility to make the most of ArtStart.
My first attempt at writing this article read very much like the report I submitted to the Australia Council on finishing ArtStart, where I justified how the funds were spent in terms of benefit to my artistic practice. But this does little to illustrate the real impact of ArtStart. It speaks more to my nervous condition as an artist, which compels me to incessantly defend what I do as a legitimate profession. Instead, I’ve decided to give a snapshot of my year in moments and turning points.
ArtStart afforded me the opportunity to take a step back from the blur and short-sightedness of working from project to project
Sitting in a café in Melbourne with my professional mentor Tamara Saulwick. She asked me about the kind of work I make. This felt like a challenging question. She asked me which artists or groups make similar work to me. I mentioned being inspired by Back to Back Theatre, which was convenient as I was just about to start a week-long secondment with them. Given my interest in youth-led creative processes, Tamara reeled off a number of names for me to check out, including acclaimed Belgian companies Ontroerend Goed and CAMPO.
Sitting in the Back to Back office at the end of my secondment. I recognised that this was the kind of workplace I could happily spend much of my career. I felt motivated to explore different approaches to community-based practice as a means of deepening my own. I now felt like I had something to aim towards – a creative role in a community-based organisation – rather than simply working from project to project.
Months of sending introductory emails to artists and companies on the other side of the planet, planning a six-week trip through the UK, Netherlands and Germany. Luckily, I had been processing Tamara’s questions for some time so the thought of condensing my practice into a paragraph (or a website or a business card) no longer intimidated me. The process just seemed to snowball. It started with talking to Tamara and then Sylvia Rimat – a Bristol-based performance maker who I had bumped into at a barbeque in Sydney – and ended with an itinerary of meetings, observations, programs and festivals tailored specifically to my enquiries as an emerging artist. It would have been impossible for me to plan a trip with the same breadth of activities in Australia. And whenever I contacted someone new, I was able to contextualise things in terms of the support I was receiving from the Australian Government. Or, more accurately, the panel of industry professionals who believed I had the right strategies to make the most of ArtStart. In terms of a calling card, it was less about the money and more about where it came from.
Standing in the sunny atrium of a wet hostel for homeless people in London. On my way there, a man asked me for money. I recognised him as a resident of the hostel from the previous week. I explained that I was on my way to volunteer for Duckie’s Slaughterhouse Club and he immediately opened up to me. The day was filled with similar moments, as I assisted artists Robin Whitmore and Tim Brunsden to facilitate the expression of residents, whether through creative modes or otherwise. It was one of the most challenging, exhausting and rewarding experiences of my life and, like Back to Back, made me think about the kind of environment I’d like to exist in as an artist.
Hanging out in the open-plan office of Bristol-based artist network Interval. Through local government subsidy and a small membership fee, members of Interval share space, equipment and expertise to support each other and performance in Bristol more broadly. I began to wonder about the history of artist networks in Sydney and the potential for these to support emerging artists in the future.
Watching an Ontroerend Goed show, meeting the Artistic Director, watching a CAMPO show, and meeting the Associate Artist in the space of two days in the Netherlands. I felt I had come full circle from my meeting with Tamara less than a year ago.
Letting go of a project I had been working on for over two years. The process had become increasingly messy but I had continued to hold on tightly, afraid that admitting “defeat” would deem all my efforts wasted. I think this comes down to feeling rushed as an emerging artist. Gratefully, everything I experienced as a result of ArtStart culminated in the realisation that this wasn’t true. In fact, admitting defeat was the best thing I could have done and has allowed me to commit to learning from my mistakes.
ArtStart afforded me the opportunity to take a step back from the blur and short-sightedness of working from project to project in the years since university. I now feel far-sighted, having developed a more long-term and sustainable approach to my practice while becoming more aware of the communities intertwined with it. Throughout the year, not to mention my career so far, one thing has led to another.
There’s no telling where a single opportunity will take you. Without pushing the metaphor of short-sightedness, there’s similarly no way of truly quantifying the impact of cancelling ArtStart. But that’s something for the broader community to judge and not just the Daily Telegraph.
