Gift of Freedom Award for Sculptors Finalists Katie Grinnan
Excerpts from her Application for the Gift of Freedom Award In response to "Five hundred a year stands
for the power to contemplate... a lock on the door means the power to
think for oneself." Most artists today work two jobs. One affords them the
ability to do the other which is making art. This can become quite a balancing
act at its best or struggle at its worst. I feel as if I have felt both
sides of this situation. There are some times when I have felt that I
have attained a balance between my job and my art and during those periods
it is definitely easier to think, look at things, make decisions, etc. Times of struggle bring out a different type
of creativity. Sometimes I’m working at my job to the point where
there is no time to think about art. At other times I have time to think
but very little money to buy materials. These constraints sometimes can
be interesting and in many instances can open up a lot of new possibilities.... The second part of this quote feels a little more antiquated.
I don’t think an artist has to have a metaphorical lock on the door
to make art or have an idea. It’s a more open experience and doesn’t
have to be bottled up. I think in the past probably it was really important
to have one space in which to work and think, and it was probably less
of a shared experience. Today the process of thinking and making has opened
up significantly. There is an art community and it is easy to have a peer
group within this network. My studio space adjoins with another artist
and my entire block alone is filled with artist studios. We work around
each other, get feedback on our work, learn from and influence each other.
It is not a lonely experience. It is one that is filled with support.... The days where an artist works alone in a room
have changed. An artist still needs the power to think for him or herself,
of course, but a "lock on the door" does not prove helpful anymore.
But an unlocked door provides endless possibilities to artists. Possibilities
that were not available to artists in the past. I feel lucky to be an
artist in this time. Top Hilja Keading
Excerpts from her Application for the Gift of Freedom Award In response to "Poetry ought to have a mother as
well as a father." Poetry reveals condensed
instances of truth. It is free of pretension—it is love—it
is dignity—and poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father.
In order to see or express poetry, love, or truth, we must have experienced
profound trust. The father encourages persistence of vision, but the mother
gives us the courage to see. She validates our perceptions and allows
us to trust them, she confirms our place in the world and our ability
to recognize and communicate the truth within it. Her trust allows us
to develop our true self, and from there, we are able to give and receive
love because we believe we have the strength to manage all the joys and
sorrow it encompasses. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf writes,
"It is more important to be oneself than anything else." The
internalized mother, or basic trust, is a crucial prerequisite for the
ability to cultivate rather than disguise our identity. But deprived of
basic trust, our identity is unstable; we second-guess others and ourselves
because we are susceptible to pre-verbal anxieties formed in childhood.
We question our perceptions, intuitions and desires because they were
not mirrored back to us. Rather than embrace the world with all its complexities
and surprises, we guard against it; we form personas that are defense
mechanisms in disguise. My artwork mirrors the conflicts, desires,
and beauty I have experienced during the process of formulating a view
of Self... At an early age I sensed that there was a discrepancy between
the public version and the private experiences of my life. I learned to
perform to receive attention, I was acutely aware of my body, and during
my adult life, I realized that I did not know the person underneath the
performing character... I believe, to paraphrase Nietzsche, that art affirms
life in all its terror. Art allowed me to find a voice as a child, and
as an adult, the belief that I can create something meaningful; find poetry
in the mundane. This has been a consistent motivation for developing my
life and my art.
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