Artists International Funding Opportunity - Arts council first deadline May 31st

If you are an artist interested in international collaboration and you are based in England, there is an opportunity for funding from the Arts council (£1K-£5K).  This is to advocate for the benefits of international working and to develop individual artists.  The criteria for assessment fall under 3 headings;
1. Quality - artistic rationale; track record for work with partners in that country; evidence of recognition in England
2. Viability - schedule; letter from partners in host country; support from British council in host country (though this is not essential); approaches to other funding sources
3. Relevance - why this country? why international?
The full details of how to apply and eligibility can be found here http://bit.ly/J8Tm5z
My experience of being part of the Artist links programme in Brazil was inspiring. A report of the value of that programme can be found at the above link.

I would offer a couple of personal thoughts for anyone planning a proposal.

• Limitation is stimulation but travel broadens the mind.  Detail and thoroughness in the planning can allow space for you and your work to be affected and transformed by the international encounter. 
• This opportunity invites ambition.  As Michelangelo once said, the greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that we aim too low and we reach it. 

When Dickens finished ... Pleasure and regret - Pleasure in the achievement of a long design, regret in the separation from many companions

Pleasure and regret - this is what Dickens wrote after completing David Copperfield. Having just spent six months with the characters of the novel and mounting a stage production, I feel I understand a little of how he must have felt - the satisfaction of completing the task but the loss of the creative endeavour and the engagement with an imaginary world. Here's more... "It would concern the reader little, perhaps, to know how sorrowfully the pen is laid down at the close of a two-years' imaginative task; or how an Author feels as if he were dismissing some portion of himself into the shadowy world, for ever."

Project Art Works @ MKGallery until Jan 8th - Seeing the new year with different eyes...

What really impresses about States and Spaces, the exhibition at MK gallery by Project Art Works, is all the collaboration; whole teams of two different arts organisations working closely with each other to design and build; individual artists collaborating alongside people with neurological impairments; artists collaborating with civic leaders and engaging with civic spaces; arts organisations collaborating with the health and education sector.

And the art is excellent – not just in measurements of inclusion, diversity, equality and liberty, but because it invites you to see the world and its spaces with different eyes. Kate Adams well deserves her MBE for services to Art and Disability.