Arts Minister Gordon Ramsay announced this week that 15 artists out of 47 eligible applicants received funding from the latest Arts Activities funding round.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The applicants' proposed works ranged from music, theatre and dance to visual art and literature.
Mr Ramsay said after consultation with the arts community the $750,000 in Arts Activities funding was now divided into two rounds of $300,000 each, plus $150,000 devoted to $5000 grants that artists could apply for at any time.
He said two panels of art practitioners from both from the ACT and interstate chose the recipients to help ensure fairness.
Among the recipients was House of Sand Dance Theatre Company, which received $33,500 on its first application.
Choreographer and performer Eliza Sanders, the company's co-artistic director with her director-producer sibling Charley, said the funding would help the company produce a new multimedia work (working title That was Friday).
She said the work's creation would involve dancers from Melbourne and Canberra, a scriptwriter from New York, and a digital element that would be live streamed during performance.
"It's really the first time we're creating a devised work with this amount of support," she said.
"It's so good to be able to pay our collaborators what they deserve."
Another first-time recipient was visual artist Brenda Croft. She is an associate professor of Indigenous Art History and Curatorship at the Australian National University and a member of the Gurindji/Malngin/Mudburra peoples from the Northern Territory.
She said she would use her $50,000 grant to create a series of installation works - some made of uranium glass - from casts of a spear tip and a stone axe from the region, to create a visual dialogue with the land and to pay respects to her patrilineal heritage.
Composer Emma Kelly has been recording sounds of Canberra - including the demolition of buildings and the construction and operation of the light rail.
She said she would use her $10,200 grant to use the sounds as part of a group of songs she would write about Canberra and change.
"I'm going to process the sounds electronically," she said.
The modified and sampled sounds - which could be repitched, dragged out, chopped up or otherwise altered - would be used as the bass line for the song
The next project round will open on June 1, 2019, and close on July 1, 2019. Artists can apply for up to $5000 at any time. The next Program Funding round will open the same day with funding available for up to two years.
For more information and to see all the recipients of this funding round visit arts.act.gov.au.