DYCP Application Thoughts

I’m planning on applying for Arts Council England’s Developing Your Creative Practice fund. Recommended to me by my mentor, this funding would act as a support for this “Wasted Time” research I’m doing as well as help accelerate it. And it would accelerate me as an artist, as well.

I have struggled to see where I fit in in the world of art. I make pop music. I write poetry. I want to make audio programmes. I love academia and researching. I want to help educate. I want to tackle big ideas. I want to make something rich and mysterious and layered. But I also want to make things which are catchy, easy, joyful. How can I do all of that?

The Tiny Songs Project has helped me re-brand myself as an artist almost. I went from gloomy, self-centred songwriter to happy, weird, music-maker and image creator. It’s also changed the way I dress myself, too. I wear a lot more colour now, or am drawn to it at least (don’t really have the budget for a wardrobe overhaul at the moment). See the above photos for the difference.

The DYCP application requires me to plan out what I would do with the fund, who I would get in touch with, what milestones I would aim to reach and how I would measure my progress. I’m not sure at the moment what any of that would exactly entail, but I have some ideas. Here they are in note form:

MY MAIN QUESTIONS

• How can we make the idea of "lost time" less negative?

• How can our planet help our perspective of time?

• Can pop music & the culture surrounding it be a vehicle for solutions to these questions?

AREAS OF INTEREST

I would like to network with people, organisations and places in these areas

• the arctic

• the ocean

• geology

• astrophysics

• indie pop and punk music

• audio-making (like Transom for example)

• Norse/Celtic myth and folklore

MEDIUMS TO WORK WITH

• music — writing an album or an EP

• podcasting/audio

• written blog

• visual diary/sketchbook

• diagrams or maps

• performance

• workshops/teaching

• animation

ACTIVITIES TO DO

• geological exploration of a place

• stay somewhere remote up North

• collect oral histories around nature and myth of a place

• create a series of deep time event reconstructions

• create a podcast from the information I research or an enriched audio piece by including the songs I write

• pop album pop concert zine for geological events, merch for geological events or areas so we can care about them like we care about our favourite band

It's Mine

It’s funny doing research about lost time in a period of your life where time sometimes feels well and truly lost. Poof, gone in a cloud as soon as you reach out to touch it.

Yesterday Boris Johnson announced that English lockdown would continue until early March. I knew that was coming but hearing it on the news just gave me this sinking feeling in my heart. More time to kill. How was I going to do it?

It felt especially hard since I’ve been feeling a bit more anxious and easily aggravated recently. Stuff around control and time are top of my mind. For example — I’m living with my parents at the moment, and this morning my Mum came into my room to ask for some help with a work problem. I had literally just woken up but I spent an hour on it with her. We would also have a work meeting in the afternoon. Just as I got up to get dressed, she suggested I walk into town and buy some fish for dinner. My jaw tensed as I realised that I had now just had the bulk of my day planned out for me within a matter of minutes. I felt like I wasn’t in control of my time.

We worked it out and I didn’t go to the fish shop. The annoyance around the exchange is still lingering, just because it’s something I also felt when I was back in London. One of my flatmates would be keen to drink or have dinner with everyone one evening, or someone would invite a friend round that day or not tell me about it until that day, and boom, all of a sudden I’m obliged to socialise and change my plans last minute. I know it’s not terrible, but it’s just… I care so much about my time and being in control of it. Knowing what’s going to happen next. And in these stretches where it might seem to people that I have a whole expanse of time at my hands, using time the way I want to use it becomes even more important.

It’s like asking a busy person to do a job for you. Sometimes its easier when you’re busy to fit other people in. But when your time is like a vast, empty open landscape, and you’re trying to make sense of it and figure out how to build it, if someone just plonks a castle in the middle of your landscape, it’s gonna piss you off. I know I haven’t got anything going on here just yet, but I need to make this mine.

All of this might sound like whining but I think that cataloguing my feelings around time as I pass through this phase of lockdown is very important. Being stuck in the house, only having one friend to socialise in person with, not being able to travel further than 5 miles from my city, being on furlough and trying to feel purposeful at the same time, having very little money, being apart from my boyfriend as our relationship becomes long distance… these are all human things and the feelings I feel around them might actually help me figure out some ideas with lost time. Even my anxieties around creating this project are helpful clues, too.

That’s all for today.