One specific grant rejection really got under my skin last year. I had done a couple of quite successful projects recently, and I thought they would look really good in my proposal. As such, I felt like I had the grant “in the bag,” so to say – which, knowing the realities of the grants system, is just fantasy. I guess that on some subconscious level, I kind of felt like I was somehow entitled to it. 

I had already built a working plan inside my head which wasn’t easy to dismantle: it briefly felt like a broader rejection of my practice, like I had somehow tried my best but produced something disappointing, unworthy of funding. Somehow however, this first rejection felt worse than the string of rejections that followed during that year. In the end, 2022 brought me nothing but failed grant applications, and not much more luck with open calls and such. It did cause a lot of anxiety and uncertainty.

I tend to work a lot with physical material and objects, so I feel like I always have something concrete to present, and my stuff is thus fairly easy to write about. At least that’s what I often think. So I sometimes catch myself thinking that some things about it are so self-evident that they don’t need much extra convincing to support whatever point I’m trying to get across. However, that doesn’t always really translate well to a successful grant application.

I’ve had to work a lot on my artistic self-esteem throughout the years, so I would say that nowadays I have a much greater trust in what I do, and that has gotten me through a lot. But, as a result, I tend to take artistic matters also quite personally, which also leads to me being a bit defensive about my craft, and maybe taking things for granted at times.