What's it for and what's in it for you and who are we anyway?

Vivi-Mari Carpelan: "Elegy on the Eternal Dilemma"

You may be asking yourself a lot of questions about our project. Of course, there is no way for us of telling what might be going through your mind, but I will venture to answer some hypothetical questions, some of which have come up in the discussion with a good friend.

For starters, you may wish to support us because we're poor struggling artists, but you're not sure if it's really true. After all, we're all dressed up with nice props in the video, and Martin is having a sip of wine from a beautiful wine glass... well, we felt that some investment was necessary although we didn't have the means for any greater ones, so we got a bottle of cheap Spanish wine for £ 3.49 from the Co-Op. After all, it would come to some good use after a hard day's video filming as fear and anxiety about the outcome of the project was kicking in! Well... ok... the truth of the matter is that I love beautiful things so I have spent half a century collecting them (what?! that long?!), often at the expense of nourishment and by stretching my credit card... that's what you see in the film. We could of course have filmed it with ragged clothes in an old plasticky caravan out in the frozen fields... I'm only joking! In reality, we are currently struggling to pay the bills as our tiny income doesn't match the cost of living here in rural Wales. This is one of the main reasons Martin wanted to embark on this project and take matters into his own hands. We really need some hard cash, and soon - and we don't have the choice of doing anything else to improve a rather dire situation. 

As an artist, you're either working part time on your art while you're making a living doing something else, or, alternatively, you're dependent on random sales of original art work to random people at random times through random channels... neither scenario is working out for us at the moment. We wanted to break out of this rather distressing situation by finding a new way of selling art. That is, a lot of art to a lot of people for a lot of small sums of money! I'm sure you can see how we have tried to turn things around to benefit ourselves as well as others.

So how are we benefiting other people? Well, other people are really only benefiting if they feel that art is relevant to their existence. Though we can't affect this frame of mind directly, perhaps we can help indirectly by offering an opportunity to make a stand point by supporting our artistic careers? Perhaps we can encourage people to think about the implications of collecting art, even when you're not rich or even ever thought you'd be an art collector? Perhaps a look at our art will contribute to some thoughts about the meaning of art in every day life..? 

I know the time frame for our project is a bit tight and that some people might like to ponder all this for a much longer time. Unfortunately as with many things in life, we simply have to follow a dead line. As Martin has already stated, all contributions may potentially help us even if we don't reach our financial target. We will go ahead and try to get a good printing press so that we can at least do some small scale fine art printing (having someone else do it for us is financially unsustainable). 

It goes without saying that the internet allows us to reach people all over the world, but unfortunately the internet is a big noisy platform where it's quite difficult to get heard even when you're speaking English, the great universal language. Martin, who is more in charge of getting the word out there than I am, is trying to use various platforms for this purpose, but internet media aren't really all as great as they cracked up to be. The reason is very simple, and it's that there are too many voices calling out from our  boundless, echoing cyberspace. 

We are hoping that our ethical stance will speak to people. We don't want to be hard core marketers. We don't particularly like the way you have to sell yourself as an artist. But on the other hand, we want to engage with our audience and potential clientele in a personal and meaningful way. This is part of our ethos. We want everything to be fair and square and direct, without any funny business. We have a very deep conscience about these things. While you can't avoid the way the world is set up from a financial point of view, we're all about "conscious capitalism", i.e. a way of dealing with money that is as permeated with spiritual and moral consciousness as we can possibly muster.

What you can do is to support us a bit like you might support your local grocery store so they won't be out of business because of the big supermarkets that shoulder their ways into your neighbourhood. In this case, "the supermarket" is the elitist art market, which on the one hand favours the big brands that make the financial turn over really profitable, but on the other sells badly painted landscapes by the dozen, just to go with somebody's sofa. We're not condemning any of this (neither the supermarkets nor the art market - or even the sofas) but we do want to say hey! we're here too! and we can offer an alternative! 

We want to provide a service that is fun and meaningful for all concerned. Of course, there is only so much we can do! We can't really engage you in the process directly... though... hang on! Who knows what we can do? If there is an audience, there are always ways in which people can become part of the process. For instance, I would love to talk to people a lot more about the kind of art that speaks to them, and that could affect what kind of art I do! After all, I want to communicate, not just indulge in a self-absorbed artistic practice. Personally, Martin and I have become much more involved with each other's creative processes through this project, and that's been beneficial to us. We are also on the look-out for other artists. If we had a sustainable business, then we'd be able to commission other artists to come and do some art specifically to go out to our clients. Really, there is no end to what one can come up with in conjunction with an interactive audience!

Vivi-Mari