As I take a break from painting in search of writing inspiration on a sunny afternoon in late July, I consider the impact that receiving funding has had on supporting my artistic practice over 40 years and today I want to look at the impact of going through the grant application process has had on my work.
When I entered art college in1979, the dark arts of submitting funding applications were never mentioned. Not once. The Arts Council? Never. And the Visual Artists Association of Ireland? Well, no, never (in fact it had not even been established).
The only guidance that I recall about making a living after graduation was of the indirect variety. I remember distinctly that there was a very definite whiff of disapproval, combined with a kind of sniffy looking down upon the rare artist who might aspire to make a living from their work. Those who sold actual paintings were the bottom of this stinky pile. The notion of the brilliant, dedicated but starving artist eking out an existence in their parents’ or neighbourhood garage making conceptual art was endorsed by our teachers. And because most were practising artists of one kind or another, I considered that it was implied, by their presence among us, that teaching was the only honourable way for an artist to make a living.
And so, I gave up painting and became a performance artist. I also used photography, and I dabbled with teaching on and off. “Performance artist” just to be clear, means mostly that I stood naked in front of people and recited monologues. Because of this, I travelled the world, got to show alongside Robert Maplethorpe and Cindy Sherman. By the end of the last century one of my iconic images was included in a book published by the Oxford University Press and was called ‘Beauty in Art, 1750 to the 2000’.
I knew I had made it then, because not only was my image the last one in the book, but I was erroneously described as British, and a short time later, I was described as dead.
As an artist, it doesn’t get much better than this, does it?
My current project. ‘From The River to The Sea’ is supported by a bursary from Wicklow County Arts Office. My plan is to create a small number of paintings on the balcony of Wicklow Library. This is phase one of a project which will culminate in a solo show in that building at the end of next year. I started it early in June and I decided during the application process to push myself way beyond my comfort zone as a painter by live streaming some of my painting sessions from the balcony on social media. While I am a veteran of Zoom, this live virtual engagement on Instagram was a first for me. I hated myself the day I started it. I mean could I have made it any harder? But it was easy enough, and my world didn’t crumble.
Now I can accept that I mostly use these opportunities to challenge myself and do things that I wouldn’t normally consider doing.
This is how I found myself taking on another ambitious project in 2016. As an artist working from home, I like to do something interesting and challenging that involves getting out into the world, once a month. This is what brought me to Wexford town for an Art and Disability Connect Scheme information session some years ago.
Yes, it is true. I simply fancied a day out and an opportunity to meet other artists.
Most definitely, I had no intention of applying for a bursary. I just wanted stimulating conversation accompanied by a slideshow presentation with some tea and bourbon cremes in Wexford Opera Theatre.
Despite myself, I got quite excited as I munched on the biscuits provided. You see, I like plans, schemes and dreams and setting out a framework for success. It was evident that a lot of thought has gone into the idea of the Connect scheme and I thought of it as challenging. It was asking disabled artists to step up, reach forward and make a dramatic effort to do something special.
These are criteria that I find utterly irresistible.
Quickly, I began to see how I could be strategic and apply for the different strands one year at a time. But of course, I didn’t do anything like that. With only two weeks to go to the deadline, my approach could be best described as ‘scatter-gun’. I had lots of ideas and to these ideas, I added a few frills and complications such as documenting my process and creating three short movies as a means of promoting my work.
And I didn’t stop there . . . I kept going and coming back and refining as I went along.
In the end, when I finally submitted the application, it was a realistically ambitious project with three distinct strands: a mentorship with Donald Teskey, a partnership with the Mermaid Art Centre in Bray and a strand that was designed to help me get my work out into the world and find new audiences.
I wrote that my reason for applying for the grant was that I realised I was no longer able to paint outdoors. It had become just too difficult for me to achieve without any assistance (I have no arms). For this reason if I was to continue as a painter I needed to explore the possibility of moving indoors and transforming myself into a studio-based painter. I didn’t have a clue how to achieve this as I have always been inspired by painting either en plein air or portraiture. Working from sketches, drawings or photographs is not interesting for me as a painter.
By the end of the assignment, I had achieved most of my aims and moved away from painting outdoors and began using a new medium (to me) called Cold Wax. The project concluded with an artist talk together with Donald Teskey in the Mermaid Art Centre and it was rather good.
The whole endeavour was a success, if one ignores the glaring fact that I was now a studio-based painter without a studio. My garden shed where I had stored paintings for over 10 years just couldn’t perform as a studio space. It was perfect for storage, but significantly limited in every other way. I was clear it would have to be seriously upgraded.
As I made grandiose plans to replace it, my timing was terrible. A bulldozer moved in in February 2020, leaving me without any storage space, a skip filled with heaps of rubble and a house crammed with paintings and arty paraphernalia, just as the pandemic started. Progress was very slow, and everything was significantly delayed by the global crisis.
Being a creative type, I used the downtime to brush off my keyboard and write a grant application. Feeling caught between two worlds, and without a studio for the best part of a year, I sought the bursary to “buy me recovery time” to re-engage with the process of painting. I also wanted to develop a series of paintings inspired by megalithic tombs. While it wasn’t the intention of the bursary to make new work, it lead directly to a solo show the following year, in the Courthouse Arts Centre, Tinahely, (2022).
So, on reflection, I would think that the grant application process has made me consider my longer term goals and plan for the future in an uncertain world and as a result, it has been hugely positive. It is true that I often feel overwhelmed by what I’ve undertaken to do when my submission is successful. I do a fair bit of groaning when I consider my workload and commitments and often regret making the applications in the first place. But overall, I see these grant applications as essential to the process of pushing myself forward out of my comfort zone, and forcing me to take on challenging, ambitious new projects.
Before I sat down to write this, I searched out the letter that I wrote 6 months ago, accompanying my most recent successful application for arts funding. I am astonished by what I find. The letter reads as cocky and precocious, promising that if I am awarded funding, I will use it with care and not only deliver it on schedule, but with aplomb.
All artists can agree that it doesn’t pay to be backwards about coming forwards, so I guess being cocky and precocious are necessary attributes for surviving as an artist. But for me, not being backwards about coming forward is a huge effort. It doesn’t come naturally to me.
Now I’d really appreciate if you didn’t laugh outright at this point.
Those who know me well would argue my mother nailed it, when she gave me the nickname Máire Cock at the age of 18 months. But this cocky bum shuffler (I was never a toddler and didn’t walk until I was 3 and a half), feels like a very distant character. At the age of 4 or 5, just as I started in my local school, I developed a terrible stammer and that turned the confident and self-assured kid, into a quiet, reserved child, not willing to speak at all. Throughout my childhood and teenage years, I was mostly silent, awkward, watchful and shy.
But a life without arms doesn’t allow for someone who wants to have any sort of existence in the real world to be either reticent or retiring or shy. As I grew, I retained my fierce sense of independence and self-reliance that was evident long before I could walk. Now, as I enter my sixtieth fourth year, I consider my greatest artistic achievement to be making all kinds of art, consistently for well over four decades.
Working with photography led me to performance. Standing naked in front of people reciting monologues is a sure fire way to challenge the shy, retiring type to embrace a terrible stammer.
Making this kind of art made me who I am. Going back to painting makes me happy.
Bio
Mary Duffy is a lifelong, practising artist working in a variety of disciplines and media over more than four decades. Since going back to focus on painting twenty years ago, she has exhibited widely in Ireland, including eight solo exhibitions and she has been selected for the Royal Hibernian Academy Annual Exhibitions three times in recent years.
She has received multiple awards including Artists’ Choice Award and the Gold Mayoral Award at Wexford Art in the Open. Since 1989 she has received several Visual Arts Bursaries from the Arts Council of Ireland, the most recent was in 2020. She is a recent recipient of a Wicklow County Arts Bursary (2024) and is currently working towards a solo exhibition at the end of next year. Her work is represented in the Arts Council of Ireland collection, the National Self-Portrait Collection, the National University of Ireland, Galway, and Wexford County Council.