better late than never

about a month after the incumbent is already in post!
what does administrative competence mean?
and is it better to fail in the face of vigorous competition or only against a few people? is failure qualitative?

"Many thanks for applying for The Mirror residency at Wysing Arts Centre. We had 271 applications for The Mirror and a total of 617 applications across all twelve residencies. All applications were reviewed in detail by Wysing’s curatorial team which includes three individuals. It was difficult to reach a final decision but on this occasion I am sorry to tell you that you were not selected. Due to the high volume of applications we are not able to offer individual feedback to unselected artists on this occasion. I do hope you will keep in touch with Wysing and consider applying in the future.
In the meantime, we are currently advertising studio opportunities, which includes a Live/Work studio. More info here: http://www.wysingartscentre.org/artists/opportunities.html. Should you be interested in studio rentals then please contact Wysing’s Operations Director, louise Thirlwall, on louise.thirlwall@wysingartscentre.org
Donna Lynas
Director
Wysing Arts Centre"

well, I'll be gosh-darned

Dear Anna Marya,

Thank you for your application for the position of Administrator at Mimbre. Unfortunately you have not been short-listed on this occasion.

Thank you for your time and we wish you every success in your search for an appropriate position.

Regards,
Emma

but I wanted help at failing

Dear Anna-Marya,
Thank you for your recent application to the Making and Funding Work seminar, provided by a-n The Artists Information Company and WeDidThis. I am afraid that on this occasion your application has been unsuccessful. The standard of applications were very high as was the level of demand for this seminar against the availability of places, we encourage you to continue to look out for further opportunities to apply to in due course. Whilst we cannot enter into any dialogue with regard to your specific application due to time and financial restrictions please do have a look at our resources on the a-n website as these may help you with future applications.
Support schemes
Fundraising
With best wishes,
Jennie Picken
Communications & Partnerships

no time to fail

I was wondering when I stopped blogging my failures. Clearing out my old e-mails I found the answer (see below. Round about October last year I both ceased blogging and also even considering the condition of failure. My son came home from India with typhoid and its effects and his illness put everything into perspective. The next month my mother-in-law died which also had unplesant ramifications and put thoughts of personal failure out of my head.

"5 October 2011
Dear Anna-Marya,
University of Hertfordshire - AA2A Artists Access to Art Colleges Scheme
My colleagues and I would like to thank you for your time and interest in the project. There has been considerable support and interest in the AA2A scheme resulting in a high demand for the limited number of places available. It is with regret that we are unable to offer you a place on the scheme this year.
If you would like to be considered for a place next year, we can keep your details on file, so we can contact you again next year so you can apply. In that case we would just ask for you keep us updated with your personal information and professional practice. If you could please let us know if you would be interested in this option.
We would also like to point out that there may be opportunity at other establishments such as Digswell Arts Trust who are a local Foundation.
We thank you again for your application and wish you a prosperous future in your artist practice.
Yours sincerely
Nick Thomas
University Coordinator for AA2A scheme"

Wysing subtlest beast of all the field

Wysing Arts, for whose residency, "Cosmos", I exerted myself have with great subtlety announced the four successful artists, without bothering to inform the failures about their lack of success.
They are to be congratulated on this spectacular piece of PR.

otolith

Thank you very much for your application.
It has been a very difficult decision process and I'm afraid that unfortunately you weren't successful on this occasion.

We wish you all the best with future projects,
Thanks again,

Louise, Anjalika and Kodwo

//The Otolith Group

July and not such a failure

I've been busy.
I feel that I have shed my dependence on working only within a particular framework that is acceptable to the criteria set by my art degree and MA and declared statement which I think I have found very restricting. This emergence has not let to any miraculous output of work but I am happy with what I am making: I will have a small solo slot at the beginning of next year in a local space, I have been invited to review an exhibition, I am not totally invisible. I continue to apply for jobs.

LIVE DIY8

Dear Anna-Marya,

Thank you once again for your application for the ‘Liminal Bodies’ workshop. Due to a high number of applicants with very relevant practices to the themes tackled within the project, as well as a very limited capacity for the workshop, unfortunately I cannot offer you a place at this stage.

I would however like to offer you a reserve place, as this has been a very difficult decision because I found your application and images extremely interesting and feel you would be a great addition to the group. Please let me know if you would be happy to accept this reserve place on the workshop. If so, then I will be in touch as soon as possible if a place becomes available.

I am very glad to have been introduced to your practice. Please add me to your mailing list as I would love to experience your work firsthand.

Very best wishes,

Poppy

failure of pride

I am curious why I have, of late, preferenced the poverty and lowliness of my ancestry. On my mother's side, my people weren't so poor. Some sense of this lingered in her sometimes exaggerated sense of status - exacerbated by delusional mental illness, but not founded on nothing. Her father lost the bulk of his inherited wealth in the financial crash that came before 1926, the year in which my mother was born. 1926 would not have been a good year for my Swiss grandparents: already poor, with one child, they had twin girls. My mother's fate, as unwelcome number 3, was sealed; she got the leftovers of everything, so grew up with a sense of being worth less than everyone else. No wonder she left when she could.
She often spoke with pride of her own great aunt. Mädi, I think she was known as; she was featured in a national magazine as Kanton Bern's only woman pig farmer. And she was wealthy, as was the rest of that generation of family. My grandfather was given a sizeable chunk of land on the Rheinbank in Neuhausen-am-Rheinfall as his wedding gift. It was this land that allowed him to survive the financial ruin of the '20's. Initially farmed, it was gradually sold off, eventually leaving only the plot of number 10 Flurlingerweg which had on it two houses, my grandparents' house and one they rented to a couple. In 1974 when I worked in Switzerland the couple were still there and welcoming and remembered my mother. Both houses are gone now.
I have random memories all the time, some aspect of wandering brain activity that comes with age. I remember standing with my mother, must have been in the early '70's, on the street in front of the beautiful shaded house, and my mother asking for some plums from the trees planted there. Her father had planted the trees. Now years later I can feel her pain.

unattached

This is the time when I am trying to make work from my own initiative; this is proving difficult. It is no longer work suggested by anyone else, it is not in response to anyone's impulse, it is not to deadline,it is not part of a group agenda ... it is difficult.

Komarom

Komarom is a border town in NorthWest Hungary. It's in that indistinct corner where the country might be Austria or Czechoslovakia as was.
I've been reading "The Hare with the Amber Eyes"; I tripped over the name Komarom in the summary of what happened to the writer's relations from this place, an entrainment point for Auschwitz, and, as ever, I felt that sickening rush of heat and quickened heartbeat, that feeling of fearing to read on or turn the page in case I see the personal name of my father in conjunction with some atrocity. It is an absurd and exaggerated reaction, yet I can't help wondering ... Komarom was at least one place where he served as a Royal Hungarian Gendarme.
I have read de Waal's book with mixed feelings, feelings I've had in relation to other similar books as well. This excellent piece of scholarship unpeels event by event the dismantling of a Jewish family through the twists of the early twentieth century, the chapters on the consequences of Anschluss make grim reading. But here's my problem: it's difficult, even impossible, to give substance to the diasporic experience of ordinary people. De Waal's family were sufficiently grand to leave behind records of visits to the opera. Who recorded my grandparents' visits to the cowshed? Or that of the millions displaced and traumatised? And I'm not Jewish. My parents' experience and my experience of them, my post-memory, has no easy slot, precisely because it is a history of ordinary people. And even worse, my father was on the "wrong" side in so many different ways: Czechoslovak born Hungarian siding with Nazi Germany in the hope of retrieving lost land, a Royal Hungarian Gendarme signed up in the last months of immiment defeat but at the very time when deportations to the gas chambers escalated; no tale of the Shoah does not single out the Hungarian Gendarmes for ruthless brutality.
So de Waal's book is one I can read and pity the lot of his disposessed baronial family but ultimately it is not my story. Who wants to read that the pain of ordinary people, even those on the losing side is as great as that of princes?

tulips

My mother sometimes drew or painted.
It was a random activity, some creative impulse that needed an outlet; she was generally too crazy in later years to really concentrate on anything sustained, though she still knitted socks, thick woollen bedsocks in garish colours.
She was excellent at handwork, stitching and knitting shen she was young.

anniversary

7th May is the anniversary of my mother's death. Remembering this is not a symptom of morbidity but an acknowledgement that she lived, and dying is the last thing we do. Only a year after her death my father forgot; on that occasion we dragged him out for a meal but never again in subsequent years. It meant nothing to him. It means nothing to me in itself but yet it is a marker for the years that have followed. The more time passes since my parents' deaths the more real they become; for a while they were gone and I mourned them. Now, sometimes, I trip myself up thinking I might just run over to Slough. I can hear the click and echo of particular doors and smell the food frying in the kitchen; it is part day-dream, part hallucination. I can hear the fighting and sense the fear, different fears for all of us: my own fear of violence, my mother's fear of the empty nights, my father's fear of survival. We stowed these fears away privately, harboring them; sometimes they still escape as irrational behaviour even now, many years later. My daughter doesn't fear being alone in our house at night; I'm not very good at this, it's the time when old fears surface.

failed upload

failed upload

some attempts to marry photography with drawing or a failure at both?

at last an International Day worth celebrating

St Petersburg Times

March drawings that I failed to upload

last of the March drawings

inhuman resources

Applicant Number: A3373Vacancy Number: 002744 This is to confirm that your application has been received and will be processed by the Human Resources Department. We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your interest with the University of Hertfordshire. Kind Regards Human ResourcesUniversity of Hertfordshire