CPW Blogs

"You don't take a photograph, you make it." – Ansel Adams

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Artists in Residency

An artist-in-residency is a chance for artists, curators and all manner of creative people to collectively get away from their everyday lives and work on specified projects within a unique geographic and cultural context.

 

Artist residencies can last anywhere from a week to a year and nearly all residencies are in a set location year in, year out. The teams you work with can range anywhere from 1 to 30 individuals, all of which can be writers or other artists. Depending on the type of residency you do, some residencies have costs and fees which you have to pay yourself whereas, others are paid for by the company you are doing the residency with.

 

Why attend a residency? An artist residency can be a very important step in an artist’s creative career because, it is a place to create new work and collaborate with other like-minded artists and photographers. It also provides artists with the opportunity to live and work in a different region or country. A good website for finding artist residencies is https://resartis.org/listings.

 

When applying for an artist residency you need to remember to thoroughly research the host organisation and, decide what you want to get out of the experience of the residency. Always remember to plan ahead by checking deadline dates and, reading the guidelines of the project carefully. Finally, always keep your CV, artist statement and biography up to date because the host organisation will want to see visual examples of the type of work you do.

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What is a CV? What is a bio? What is a statement? Why do we need them?

What is a CV? A curriculum vitae, Latin for ‘course of life’ is a short-written summary of a person’s career achievements, qualifications and education. When writing about oneself, you need to be clear, concise and conventional from the very beginning. A CV is a way of expressing to the employer how you are the perfect fit for the job, a way of highlighting all your relevant skills and past employment. At the end of the day a CV is just a list. It may be a very impressive list but, it is just a list. Be sure to keep it up-to-date and improve on it and, add to it when asked.

 

Biographies, what are they? Well, an artist’s bio is a way to express to your audience who you really are and what your work means to you. In many biographies you tend to find where the artist has come from, the journey through which they came to be where they are now and their many achievements such as; awards, shows and publications.

 

Statements … A statement can be a short introduction to many various things such as; your practice as a whole, a specific body of work, wider concerns, motivations and processes. Statements are useful for many reasons because, they introduce you and your work, they focus your thinking, they can be used for websites and press releases and finally, they are mainly used for the ongoing reflections of the artist.

 

Many people confuse the bio with the statement but, even more confuse the CV with the bio. I hope the concise information I have supplied above will help you with the understanding of the differences between CV’s, bios and statements if you ever find yourself needing to write one.

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What Is Blogging?

What is blogging? Why was it started?

 

After looking over the history of blogging and ‘Students who blog > The Scopes – Otago Polytechnic’ by Rachel Gillies, I’ve come to the conclusion that blogging is a place where authors can catalogue their thoughts on the World Wide Web. (Gillies, 2009) Gillies states this in her post about the students she taught at the Dunedin School of Art at Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand. Having taught them to use their blogs as a place for reflection and development, this has been a common theme in blogs since it started in 1994. I believe, the blog was created to log one’s personal thoughts in a diary-like form around what was happening in their personal life but also on the everyday news of the outside world.

 

‘The Blog’ has changed vastly from 1994-2014. By 2014, the blog was considered ‘dead’ – It stepped aside for social media also known as ‘micro-blogging’ on websites such as Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and many more. However, blogging still appears across vast genres on the internet because, in the 2018 Sensis social media report, they found that 68% of all internet users read online reviews and blogs. This shows the blog is still alive in one way or another.

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