Sea sculptors ask for more help

I totally endorse this article in todays West Australian Newspaper which calls for the Department of Culture and the arts to increase there funding to the Cottesloe Sculpture by the Sea Exhibition (SSX). As the article outlines a lot of artists exhibiting in this event take a lot financial risk to be able to exhibit. SSX gurantees that all artist will recieve $1000 dollars if they don't make any sales during the exhibition. This money is largely provided through the provision of funding from the Western Australian Department of Culture and the Arts.

I am pretty frugal with my money so I went to many lengths to save money on the project to prevent myself going in to too much debt. This involved making absolutley everything from hand. My motto was that I have time to spare but not a lot of money to spare. Laser cutting was a very tempting option when it came to making 160 lantern shaped spacers, but at $800 dollars I flagged that idea. Instead I have an ingenious father who welded up a cutter to stamp out all of these plastic fittings.

When it came to finding plastic to make the pods. Instead of buying raw material I cruised new housing development sites to find find my treasured brick straps.

These are just a few of my frugal ways which I employed to avoid racking up too much debt.

However, envitablly when you work on a project of this scale you will run up a bit of a debt. I have a $3000 debt for all the new steel and fittings I purchased.

When it comes to labour well the piece took around 400 hours of my own time to create. I was pretty strict at keeping a log book, so that for future projects I have a guide to how long it will take. I also owe my dad for around 60 hours labour, for all the technical advice and welding expertise he brought to the project.

Anyway, I am not writing this blog to rant at how much time and money was spent on the project. But merely to outline that the government expenditure to SSX would basically be a token gesture to cover costs incurred by the artists. It would be great if they come through with the full amount of funding request by SSX.