18/2 Grant Research
Okay so a round up:
I have been applying to comps and grants. I have a 3 month free trial for for photographers only. Application to alexia grant is complete and I got a personal email from them (emailing me at midnight offering to open up the submission for edits so that I could add more detailed captions to each of the images e.g. 2000 words of writing and I had until 4 in the morning lol) so that’s a good sign that I might have survived the initial cull...
This is the folder with the rest of my ongoing/ completed applications, where I store any draft writing I do for the text, and all of the resized files for entry.
JUP, feeling seen, A.n guide, and Alexia are complete, athens ongoing, WEX I’ve ditched, NLPG I’ve started (Phil told me about this sneaky deadline extension where you start before it closes and then it will reopen for edits until April) but I will probably delay until a future round opens and work on it with Clare mentoring post uni.
The other part of this was ongoing when I originally wrote this and I want the brownie points for the work, but I since decided not to apply for the realisation grant. The reason I went off it was partly feeling too rushed, largely because it took Mike a lot longer between initial contact and my next few emails to reply, and in the end the fee we discussed doubled (£350 day rate originally), which would have been fine given more time to figure that out in a budget, but I had like 2 days after he sent me this:
That said, pretend I didn’t say that while you read the rest of this...
I want to apply to the realisation grant, I have spoken to Phil for advice and now Mike who has agreed to be my material specialist, yay! So I’ve been going through the various factors:
First a way to holistically describe the process, to identify where the realisation grant will come in, what it will & won’t cover, and to make it clear that this is an organised thing with momentum that they should back with money.
Phase 1 [Grant NOT Covering]
Duration: 10 months
Dates: October 2025 - June 2026 (subject to grant start date)
- Initial research
- Image making
- Material research
- Initial realisation/ display (outcome included in submission, untitled (Goethite))
- Development of material research (identifying further patination methods from Hughes & Rowe’s book)
Phase 2 [Covered by Realisation Grant]
Duration: 1 year
Proposed Dates: July 2026 - July 2027
- Action Research at the Centre for Print Research alongside materials specialist Mike White (testing patination techniques on 32 brass ’coupons’)
- Material production (7 44x55cm Brass Panels, uniquely patinated using select tested processes)
Phase 3 [Grant NOT Covering]
Duration: ?
Proposed Dates: ?
- Identifying spaces for dissemination
- Exhibition strategy & materialisation (at this point panels will be cut & adapted into frames)
Budget:
What's to be included:
- Hours for me and mike
- Cost of space (to test in)
- Cost of ‘active’ materials (brass + chemicals)
- Cost of infrastructural materials (big buckets, sawdust, ?)
Not to be included:
- Cost of printing the photographs themselves or any related materials
- Cost of laser cutting the panels, as this will be done in phase 3 of the
Starting with budget because it’s a practical document that helps me to get my head around things, but obviously the intended outcomes & method & research will come first in the end.
Intended outcomes:
[7] 44x55cm Brass Panels, uniquely patinated using techniques researched and tested at the Centre for Print Research alongside materials specialist Mike White.
Panels to be laser as frames to display an ongoing photographic body of work, Crystal Garden.
This grant would be used to support the research and production of display materials for a materially sensitive body of work in which the mode of display is as integral to the viewers experience as the images themselves. As stated in the description, Crystal Garden is a project which deals with a personal history of depression, and attempts to reach out to others with similar experiences to explore together a spacious landscape found between external and internal worlds. It is a space that I feel is necessary to invite others into, those who can relate and those who do not find it easy to, because I have found it to be separable from the sadness that often occupies it, and to hold the potential for intense and life-affirming joy.
At present, Crystal Garden creates this space as a ‘perceptual distance’ through the display of silver gelatine prints that have been exposed backwards and are presented behind layers of diffusion, within larger planes of steel that have been stripped of their protective coating and re-patinated through a playful process-led exploration of the properties of metal. Images function within the work to tell a story of many distances, between a parent and a child, between internal and external worlds, and between past and present experiences of those worlds. But it is the material plane of display around the image which holds the affective power to communicate the perceptual distance, not by visualising it, but by drawing something of the natural world into the room where the image is viewed, so that people who see the natural world in this abstracted way, have access to a fragment of the natural world to be experiencing in that moment. In order to evoke feeling and to tell a story, this work is reliant on metal as a material that is reactive, sensitive, and alchemical, which has the physical and chemical form to hold stories within its form, and to reflect a capacity for change.
(as much as I can write properly today)
The third paragraph has to express how all this will equal the realisation of the project, which is a tricky one to work around because ideally I would only put the two pieces of the project together (images and brass panels) once I have identified an exhibition space. An issue I need to work around is that the grant money would probably be perfect just covering the development and production of the brass panels, everything else like the cost of laser cutting them, attaching mounts to them, and hiring a space for exhibition etc, would not only mount up, but would be much better calculated after the year is up and the brass has been produced, and as a part of that I see no need to cut into the panels until a space to exhibit them has been identified, as the exhibition strategy could really play with those holes and how they are utilised within a space.
Anyway, having spoken to Phil, they said it can be used to realise a significant stage of a project instead. So, what my third paragraph has to make clear is that I am realising a significant stage which will allow me to create a resonant base material which will connect with people once it is brought into an appropriate form of dissemination. When that happens, it will bring out the magic of both this material and this life story of slight disconnection, slight intense connection etc etc.
I am wondering whether it will be possible or a good idea to put my outline plan into the proposal, to make it clear that this is an organised thing with momentum that they should back with money?