Elsie Lange
Art, in all its many mediums, is infinitely powerful, buoying society through difficult times like a lighthouse in a storm.
Over the last two years, with many of us confined to our rooms or houses seeking escape through film, music and art, people experienced a new-found respect for industries that suffered blow after blow from the pandemic.
To recognise art’s role in lifting up communities, Hume council last week dished out almost $50,000 as part of its 2022 Arts Grants Program, to further bolster creativity in the municipality.
Fourteen individuals and projects shared in the funding, including two Sunbury locals: artist and teacher Shay Downer, and comedian, filmmaker and writer Chido Mwat.
Ms Mwat, who also works as a doctor, is delighted to have scored $3000 to make a mock reality web-series of three short episodes, between 30 seconds and a minute long.
“It is set up as a reality show where a group of problem solvers, the adulterers, come to help people facing problems with adulting, whether that be sharehouse problems or making friends as an adult,” Ms Mwat explained.
“It’s just a play on the troubles we face and trying to satirise that, but also giving solid advice on navigating young adulthood.”
The young artist, originally from Zimbabwe, saw the grant on a list compiled by Multicultural Arts Victoria and straight away applied.
“It’s really exciting, and also a relief, because this is a project I’ve wanted to do for almost a year now. I’ve been saving up my own money as well, but also needing the grant money to make it the way I’d hoped to make it,” Ms Mwat said.
She’s hoping to have the project finished by the end of the year.
Artist Shay Downer, whose art is currently being showcased alongside her students at the Hume Global Learning Centre in Sunbury until June 12, scored one of the individual creative development grants worth $1000.
Ms Downer said she’s going to use the grant to extend her training, to then pay those skills forward.
“Artists are always experimenting anyway, but I feel it’s even more important for me as a teacher to be able to stretch myself and learn new things that I can then pass on to my students,” Ms Downer said.
“That’s the way I feel about teaching, I have to be a better artist with more experience so that I can pass on my experience to them.”
At a council meeting last week, Cr Jarrod Bell said it was his “absolute great pleasure” to present the first-ever allocation of the arts grants program.
“It’s been fantastic to see the excitement that this grant program created around the arts and cultural community in our city,” Cr Bell said.
“I know in Jacksons Creek Ward, there were many fantastic, skilled, developing artists and practitioners of their various forms and mediums who saw this as a great opportunity, but also saw this as a vote of confidence from their city and from their council, in the value and importance of arts.”
He added that the arts don’t just pertain to “pretty paintings on walls and dancing on stages”, but that artists were “the entrepreneurs of the world”.
“There is a connection between those who create in an artistic sense and those who then bring value to the world in other ways, shapes and forms,” he said.
Ms Downer said she was “so grateful” to the council, which has supported her work throughout her career in Sunbury.
“Covid really decimated my profession and my teaching, so having support really has been very significant in helping me to continue to teach and support other young artists or older artists, or people that are wanting to practice,” Ms Downer said.
