Reflections on defining myself as an artist
Recently I met with Co-Director of The Barn, Giulia. She was an absolute delight to speak with!
Before the meeting
Before the meeting, I was pretty nervous. The connections I made through the CFINE Community Music Project allowed me to organise this meeting. I set up the meeting as an opportunity for me to present myself as an artist and what I can offer, whilst acknowledging and celebrating CFINE's role in supporting my work. I wanted to offer something a bit similar with what I did with CFINE when I coordinated the CFINE Community Music Project (songwriting workshops with the community inspired by community gardens, grounded physically in walks and interactions with the gardens, culminating in a recorded community track or showcase event) but I wanted to add the element of creating something new as an artist myself, developing site-specific original work alongside engaging the community. A lot of the nerves came from the idea of putting myself forward in my role as an artist, and centralising that in the conversation. I was worried that I would revert to the comfortable topic of how I can help with community engagement, centralising their needs and voices - as I’ve worked that way a lot. For me, there is a discomfort in shifting my own creative practice to the forefront, and a fear that my value in that realm isn’t worth putting forward, or that it will not be recognised. I was nervous about being taken seriously as a professional artist. Despite these fears I was determined to push through, find the courage to work through that discomfort, and present the value and quality of my own creative work and why that would be of interest to them.
I entered the meeting considering that they probably wouldn’t have a pot of funding they would offer me on a plate, but with the hope they would be open to exploring how we might identify funding together to make something like this viable.
I entered the meeting with an understanding that, for The Barn, hiring me with my skillset could offer insight into the communities in the area, exploring themes of what community means, provide opportunities for the local residents to use their voice, get their voice heard, and that it also had the potential to raise visibility about what the Barn does through high quality artistic output and community engagement.
I arrived for the meeting early, and sat in the Buchanans Bistro cafe with a cup of tea. I was doing OK, but a fog of anxiety hit me and all of a sudden I kind of forgot why I was there. I conjured up the idea that Giulia would be resentful of me disrupting her surely busy schedule! I quelled this bout of imposter syndrome with the reminder that she had agreed to meet with me, and that I wasn’t forcing myself on anyone.
How did the meeting go? - Reflecting
The meeting went as well as I could have imagined! Friendly, encouraging, and a bit like a job interview. I shared a bit about my work, and my ideas for a project at the Barn, and she was interested.
She said towards the end - let’s not slow down, let’s keep this moving! She suggested that I put together a proposal and share it with her, that she’d be happy to review it and work together on it, and include her team in the conversations. She wanted to see regular workshops with the community. She suggested a theme as a basis for the project. She asked me to send her more information about my previous projects and to let her know if I've got anything coming up because she’d be interested to hear about it.
I already had an activity lined up for directly after the meeting, so that I could enjoy something whether or not the meeting went well - a quiet walk in The Barn’s lovely wildlife garden. I had the garden to myself where I could soak up the budding trees, snowdrops, birdsong, and babbling brook.
Despite the positive results of the meeting, for a little while my brain did that thing where it landed on the little things that felt awkward or that made me unsure, like a butterfly flitting from place to place. I did what I could to quell those thoughts, and I think I succeeded. However my nervous system took its own time to catch up. When I got home all I was good for was eating ice cream directly from the tub in front of Netflix for a couple of hours, after which I felt somewhat recovered. However that night when I tried to sleep I woke up several times with a feeling of anxiety roiling in my stomach, leading me to thoughts of ‘what on earth have I done?’. Reflecting on this, I think I was experiencing a sort of creativity - anxiety spiral. I tried to tell myself that I wasn’t wrong to put myself out there, it was just uncomfortable and scary! I freaked myself out a bit with my own audacity and visibility, and took a wee while to recover!
The day after the meeting, as requested, I sent Giulia some more information about what I do, previous project examples, and what I’ve got coming up/ in development, with a promise that a draft proposal would shortly follow.
Sending that email felt good, and grounded. I was following up on a direct ask and taking the next steps that we’d discussed at the meeting. The very opposite of ‘cold calling’, this was in response to a warm and enthusiastic encouragement from Giulia, - I was particularly encouraged by the fact that at the meeting she smiled warmly and the way she repeated “amazing” “beautiful” when I spoke about my work.
Working through my hesitations - recognising myself in the picture
I can now comfortably say that the meeting went exceptionally well - just about as well as it could have, to my mind.
The next thing I noticed was that when I imagined the project actually happening I found it hard to imagine a reality where the project included a role for me as an artist and not “just a community facilitator”.
As I write a draft proposal for Giulia, it’s important for me to maintain my artistic role, and avoid falling into the relative comfort and familiarity of being a community facilitator first and foremost.
It’s not like I haven’t worked centred on my artistic practice before, but I am noticing I still find this difficult to ‘sell’ and believe in. In 2022, when I was awarded an artist’s commission from Aberdeen Performing Arts to create a work for their Wonderland Festival, I was very lucky to work with the fantastic festival producer, Jo Matthews. The commission bridged the artist and community gap and when I went to Jo and said ‘just so I understand, are my community workshops to support other people to write their own songs, or am I writing the songs’ she said without hesitation, ‘you are writing the songs - you are the artist’. This was a very validating experience! A lot of my work over the years has been to encourage community members to think of themselves as the artist, and while I still think this is important, I noticed I was neglecting putting myself into that role. Ultimately it can help not just me but also communities I work with if I own my own role as an artist, and centre that.
However, that’s easier said than done, and the past few years have been a one step forward two steps back kind of situation, where I struggle to maintain confidence in my positioning as an artist without consistent external validation. I’ve had to learn that no one is going to hold my hand all the time - at some point I need to step into my role as an artist, believe in it, and communicate it confidently.
I was worried I would do this again with The Barn. One thing I learnt from the meeting with Giulia is that The Barn wants community engagement, especially with young people, because they already have good connections with the 55+ audience. That’s a priority for them.
As I mulled over the meeting and my potential role moving forward, I had to convince myself not to focus solely on this priority, but to continue to honour my priorities too, which are:
I want to develop and centre my music and songwriting practice, not just to be “a facilitator for a target group” and deliver workshops. I want the project to reflect my artistic identity.
I think I was worried that I couldn’t centre my artistic identify without that being in opposition to The Barns community priorities. That false opposition made it hard to imagine a version of this project where I am fully visible as an artist rather than just a conduit for community engagement.
But I’m coming to terms with the fact that I don’t need to frame it as “either I’m artist first or community first”.
Reframing:
my music and creative work fuels engagement
community workshops are part of my artistic ecosystem (artistic lab) (artistic research process)
The Barn gets their community engagement objective; I get to develop work in context.
thinking of it as a residency with community embedded, not a series of workshops.
To further prepare myself, I took some time to visualise what it would look like if I fully allowed myself to lead this project as an artist. This is what I dreamt up:
If I fully allowed myself to lead this as an artist, I would feel inspired by my surroundings and the people there, prioritise my own creative practice and model this to others, I would create new work, in progress as part of the showing up, I would know I have the permission to lead in my capacity as an artist, there would be time and space that was protected for me and developing my own work, and this would also form part of the way I interact with the community group(s) and the space and location, I would feel belonging and ownership over the space I was using while on site, I would recognise that my creative work is a valuable and important output of this project.
I realised that none of that conflicts with community engagement. What it conflicts with is martyrdom.
I’m not trying to hijack community engagement spaces and make them about me. My artistic development is not in conflict with working with communities. In fact, it could be the most powerful thing I can model. What if I gave them something by showing them an artist who hasn’t flattened herself to fit a system?
My music, ideas and vision can form a solid centre to the project, which radiates out as a way to engage the community in meaningful ways. Community participation is part of the composition of new artistic work.
I paid attention to how my body responded when I dreamed up this vision of the project, and I felt expansive and liberated - a good sign I think.
Dreaming & research
Before I get down to the brass tacks of drafting a proposal I have the desire to, as I often do, circle this from all angles. Look at it from the North, South, East and West, before I approach and zone in.
Part of this process is doing a bit of research to address questions such as “What have other people done that’s kind of similar?” and “Are there models I can learn from?” Alongside that, there is dreaming and thinking big - what would I love this project to look like?
Research
Here is my moving and morphing to do list of things that fall under the heading of ‘research’ -
Book a Discovery Call
Through my membership to Creative Entrepreneur's Club (CEC), I believe I have access to booking a discovery call with Rachael Arnold - she mentioned it at one of the Club’s recent meet ups. I expect she will be able to access the kind of level headed thinking that can marry artistic identity with community engagement in a sensible way that will make me wonder what I was worried about in the first place!
Inform myself of relevant policy
Another thing that came up in a recent CEC meet up - a short discussion of new government policies and how they relate to centering creativity and the arts as a tool for wellbeing. Rachel Green said something around leveraging that by using the ‘right’ language to sell our work and businesses, we could show explicitly that what we do is a priority that relates directly to this government legislation, which could contribute to getting support for our work.
What The Barn/ institutions/ funders are looking for?
It’s important to remember that, just like me, they don’t just want workshops. The Barn’s aims, and funders, are likely to also align with things like artistic quality, legacy, supporting artistic development, work with a distinctive voice and work that couldn’t be delivered by anyone else.
Rehearsing stepping fully into my own creative authority!
In what could be seen as counter-intuitive, but is a very ‘me’ move, this interaction with The Barn led me to submit an application to a completely different organisation. I’ll explain. Aberdeen Performing Arts are currently listing a “Light the Blue artist call out”. They are looking for artists to facilitate workshops with young people, but they also explicitly state that this is an opportunity to “offer local creatives the opportunity to develop their practice in live delivery settings and support them to take the next step in their career”. Because I was in the process of rewiring my brain, I read the call out advert and I understood that this was a project that centred artists. I don’t know if I would have seen and recognised that before, because my brain had started to equate working with the community in the arts with diminishing and hiding myself and my artistic identify. No more! It proved valuable research to write an application to this call out whilst practicing using wording that centred my artistic development in the picture.
Revisiting my own application from when I was awarded an artist’s commission from Aberdeen Performing Arts to create a work for their Wonderland Festival
A fantastic example of a project where I owned my role as an artist. Re-reading my application from that time may provide inspiration for my proposal for The Barn.
In addition, I have been finding it a useful exercise to draft my proposal as if it was an application in response to an advert. To do this, I have re-read the Call Out for Commissions that was published by Aberdeen Performing Arts back in 2022, and the local news article that was published about it, and re-wrote them as if they were an advert for a commission opportunity with the Barn. This has given me a framing to ‘respond’ to.
Dreaming
I have two ‘big-thinking’ ideas that are less about dreaming up this proposal for The Barn, and more about creating a multiple year vision on how I want to develop as an artist. This may or may not prove to be a useful exercise when it comes to the proposal at hand.
However, like I’ve said, I have a tendency to circle a project. I think part of this tendency comes from an understanding that sometimes my brain needs a while to catch up to a new version of reality - in this case, a version where I am not shying away and putting others before myself at all costs.
So my dreaming has been centred on the question - If I continued on this vein, what would I be able to achieve as an artist and what would the next 5 years look like?
This dreaming will take more time, and will quickly outgrow the remit of this blog post, so I’ll just leave it at that for now - but watch this space!
The proposal
I’m honing in on how the project with the Barn could be all the things - community engagement, composing new work site-specific, creating a live show that can be performed and maybe even toured, themed, site-specific work, and possibly involving collaborators for multi-media installations.
The process that I’ve worked through and reflected on in this blog post has allowed me to get down to writing the proposal to send to Giulia. I’ve got a rough draft open right now in Microsoft Word, and as I write it I notice that I do have to keep reminding myself to clearly centralise my artistic role.
Reminder to self:
Clearly centralise my artistic role - developing new materials, performing, creating outputs
Include community engagement as co-creative, ensuring outcomes serve both sides: community engagement goals and original artistic output.
Thoughts, suggestions, advice, reflections are all welcome.
Wish me luck!
