The Arts Council
Parenting is all-consuming, though also mundane and monotonous. It is both the greatest privilege alongside endless days of not very much. Triumphs are small and deeply significant. Parenting through lockdown was just more of the same and in many ways not much changed, except the village you’ve built up around yourself and your family home are GONE. You are absolutely everything to your child; entertainment, education, moral support, friend, parent, teacher…all those things that you are already but with even more intensity, with no relief.
But somehow, for me, lockdown was also a break. It was at least a change. A severing of so many habits and must-dos leaving our weeks almost empty. This led to considering again how we are ordering our lives for ourselves and our children. And included in that was consideration of my floristry business.
I have a few friends in The Industry who have been my advocates and counsellors over the years. These friends have encouraged me, poked and prodded me, and we’ve generally held each other up at times when being self-employed feels like a very lonely and vulnerable place. These friends know how much I have struggled to run my own business, helping to keep my family afloat, whilst also trying to find my voice in a highly populated and noisy marketplace where those who shout loudest are most often heard. When the wedding and events industries disappeared over a matter of days last spring, the space left felt utterly overwhelming, depressing and - for me - also a sense of relief. I didn’t feel relief immediately, but it was a growing sense over March and April of 2020. Having seen out a very quiet year in 2019 due to baby #2, I was only just getting myself back in gear when the pandemic hit…so the quiet calendar just extended. Coming into 2020 I would’ve loved to have been creating wedding flowers and looking ahead to a busy season, but as my diary was already quiet I wasn’t up against the huge shift in expected work/income that so many of my friends experienced. To this day I am grateful for that. I have watched so many friends in the wedding industry and music industry (the two industries I and my husband know best) suffer practically and emotionally as the pandemic caused mass cancellations and rescheduling. Months of livelihood gone in a matter of hours. Living under a roof that last month provided shelter and security, but which now felt uncertain, even temporary. Still makes me shudder. And I know that shudder reverberated across the country. Across the globe.
So - time. Our activities were suddenly reduced to not very much and we had far more time on our hands. I took up sea swimming (recommended). I began to receive counselling (recommended). And I took notice of an email from our local gallery that mentioned Arts Council grants. I decided to apply; scrabble a proposal together and try to inject further value into the business as it stood, give it some attention and care that I’d struggled to give it in the last few years when children have (rightly, for me) taken priority. There was a turning point in all this when I thought perhaps it was time to ask a friend to have a look over the mangle of bullet-points, wordy sentences and bloody poetry that I had spewed out. I needed someone to help me make *sense* of the mess I was quickly getting into. And that someone was Lisa.
Lisa is a gem. I knew her pre-pandemic as our girls share the same unhindered adventurous spirit and cheeky sense of humour so we’d become friends, both trying to navigate parenthood at the same kind of time. I knew already that she was a bright spark, it turns out she’s a bright spark, and then some - and with significant fundraising experience. Lisa took my scraps and shaped them. And more than that - she championed me. We spent hours talking on the phone, leaving messages, emailing and texting. As soon as Lisa was involved, things changed. Lisa pushed me further than I had anticipated. Her curiosity and genuine interest in who I am, what I do, and what I value bought a richness and depth to the application process that just wasn’t there before she became involved. I found meaning in my work and more faith and appreciation of my process. I began to see a way forward that at once honoured what I had already achieved but shone a light on what could be - even better, even richer, even more rewarding.
I began to apply for a different grant from the Arts Council, one that would help to bring to life a project that I now saw a desperate need for. The grant that had first caught my eye was focussed on developing my practice as it stood. However, the grant I initially applied for was project based and birthed what I titled “Mirrors”. Mirrors is my attempt to create a space for those who feel unseen in society and culture; anyone who is deemed to deviate from the average and is therefore not celebrated or reflected in modern and ancient media. You can read the quote by Junot Diaz that has stuck in my mind since 2018 here, and which provided the impetus for the Mirrors project. The more I looked and read of so many people’s experience of the world, where people can feel quietly but persistently rejected and unaccepted multiple times a day, I winced. I winced at my own ignorance that I have been so sheltered and privileged as to assume these issues are not relevant anymore in our modern, liberal society. It started to look like liberalism was itself a privilege. How can you fight for social liberty for the majority*, for freedom and acceptance, if your daily experience is one where society challenges your very existence? Your body? Your mind? Identity?
My own identity has been celebrated into acceptable normality, to the extent of overwhelm; I drown in a sea of white, slim, pre-menopausal, cis, women. All bodies, all lives, all minds, all sexualities, all genders, all colours, all shapes, all sizes, ALL, all people deserve the privilege of average.
And so I applied for the grant and did not receive the grant. Having waited 10 weeks for the verdict I felt OK about it. I expected and told my husband I would probably have a wave of overwhelm and relief and cry at some point, but I never did. I’m ready to, at any point, do a bit of crying, but it hasn’t felt necessary. And as I write this, I wonder if that’s because this feels like Mirrors, the project, is bigger than the Arts Council. It’s definitely bigger than me. It doesn’t feel like it needs a hunk of money to make it exist. I need to plan and then probably just start. I really hope I can play my part in valuing others and enriching the world before I leave it.
*I would like to state that some of the most active, passionate and socially aware people I have met (in real or online) are disabled, with a visible difference or neurodiverse.
All images with grateful thanks to Elena Popa.