CASE STUDY
Mary Branson
Mary Branson is best known for her largescale conceptual light sculptures and installations, particularly the iconic New Dawn 2016 sculpture in the Houses of Parliament, which celebrates the centenary of the Suffrage movement and is the first permanent piece of contemporary abstract art in the Palace of Westminster.
She has created light and sound works for the London 2012 Olympics, The Magna Carta Memorial at Runnymede, Royal Holloway University and Harvest a huge site specific installation at Box Hill, Surrey in collaboration with the Surrey Hills and National Trust, highlighting the plight of farmers facing climate change. At the beginning of 2019 Mary transformed Salisbury Cathedral into an ethereal construction site.
Mary is an award-winning print maker, a choreographer for a number of performance and dance events, and a mentor and public speaker. She enjoys the challenge of using landscape and architecture as a backdrop to site-responsive pieces. She often works with large teams of volunteers to help her realise her ambitious uses of scale and finds the shared ownership of the community an important part of her artistic process. She has held a number of artistic residencies, including for Parliament, the British Council, Crisis, the National Trust and HM Prison service, where she led an art group for women prisoners.
As many of her installations are temporary, Mary’s projects can encompass elements of performance, photography, film and sound as forms of documentation.
Q How do you fund your practice? A
I have two main income streams. The majority of my projects are publicly funded but I am also an accredited lecturer for The Arts Society. Since 2016, as a result of an Arts Council England grant I’ve also developed my print practice to be able to sell one-off pieces to the public.
Q How do your projects come to fruition? A
Since graduating I’ve built up an extensive network. It started with the local arts development officer. I put myself on the radar to get experience. It was a steep learning curve realising how much work was involved in delivering large site specific events. I learned about the value of having friends and collaborators to be involved. It gave me
a blueprint of how to make in the future. It is important to keep up to date with what local arts organisations, trusts and foundations are involved with and to keep them aware of what you are doing. I also always mentor and have a mentor on my projects because I believe in a circuit of learning.
Q What advice would you give for artists seeking funding for their projects.
A
Network: getting funding is all about knowing the people on the group who will support you. It’s all about collaboration and ACE is all about relationship building. You have to make potential funders aware of what you are doing – they can’t help you if they don’t know about you!
Preparation: do your homework and start the conversations early. Talk to people about collaborating or mentoring, so that when you start writing your application you have a grounded project rather than just ideas. When you start talking it often opens up the project beyond your original ideas.
What to consider with public funded projects: when a project is funded by public money it’s important that the project is reaching new audiences and can effectively engage with them. Legacy is also very important, this might be a film, book or a tour.
Budget: be honest about how much it really costs to put things on. You need to have costed it out properly and pay everyone fairly. Always cost in your time because you cannot have a sustainable practice without paying yourself.
Making the application: If it’s an ACE application take the questions from the Grantium portal and put them into a Word document so that you have a very strict word count. Then send that out to other people to read to make sure it’s very clear. The first question will ask you to summarise your project; if you can’t precis the project in one sentence, then you’re probably not ready to apply.
Don’t expect to be successful every time but the feedback that ACE give is excellent and you can apply again. And once you’ve been successful you have a track record.
Next month: The gallery relationship