Day 1

Two Mondays ago, the four of us who had been selected for the Artists Access to Art Schools program at the Norwich School of Art and Design met with the school officials overseeing the program. We were a sculptor, two print makers, and me, a textile artist. The other three were allumnae of the school. Not me. I'm told it's unusual to have such a preponderance of alumnae. We were given the door cards that give us access to the school, taken on a brief tour, and left at the workshops of our respective departments.

The program is sort of like a mini-residency. It comes with no money except for an allowance for materials, but you have full access to any and all equipment you need to do your project for 100 hours. You have access to the library. You can eat at the school cafe. You have a grand opportunity to network with a lot of other artists. And in the end, there's a website with some of the work you did while in the program and a link to your website, assuming you have one.

I've been working my way through A-N magazine's (www.a-n.co.uk) development toolkit. It helps you "do an inventory" of the way you practise your art and figure out where you are coming out short, so you know where to put your efforts. I'm short on networking, on taking advantage of new technologies, on knowing my audience and marketing to it, and on letting myself brainstorm and produce freely.

Basically, when it comes to the last, I do too much rejecting of ideas because I don't see how they can lead to something that will be saleable. I'm scared to death I'll waste materials even though I have a room full of them in my home, some of which I've had for many years. And I manage to do this to myself even though when I have let myself do pieces just because i loved the idea of them without considering whether they would sell or not, the results have been good. Once, after a bad breakup of a relationship, I turned out a series of shield-shaped brooches and pendants based on the idea of a "purple heart", awarded for wounds and bruises (purple) suffered in the war between the sexes. They sold in short order. Another time, when I was working with polymer clay, I made a millefiori cane of the hard eye of Newt Gingrich, thinking of it as producing "Eye (of Newt [Gingrich]) Artist's Protective Amulet", because he had tried to take every penny out of the US government's budget for arts. (He was soon brought down, hard. I take credit. Artists loved them.)

I can only give a few minutes to this blog per day, if I even manage that. But part of the idea of the thing is for the artist to be a sort of "Exhibit A: Artist at Work" for the students. When it occurred to me to keep a journal of the e xperience, it seemed like a good idea. I'm pretty sure I will always think it a good idea, even if I don't have time because I have to somehow bring some money into the family while I do the "residency". I hope it proves useful to someone.