Dear Artist, Trust your own taste!
Dear Artist,
A few things I’ve learned:
Mentorship is incredibly useful if you can find the right mentors for you – they need to be someone you can trust enough to be honest with and for, just to be honest with you.
Find someone who’s good at getting funding and ask them how they do it. Redoing successful funding applications can really help, but if you can talk to someone who knows how these things work about your specific project, so much the better.
Being able to teach what you’re good at can be very handy, especially if you have the gift of being able to work with children.
Beware instrumentalisation: our work doesn’t exist to fill out a box on a form or make people better at some aspects of ordinary life – it exists to be art, and that is always reason enough.
And try not to worry if your career makes no sense from the outside – you know how all the wires connect around the back where no one else sees. Just keep going and let others try and work it out when you have a body of work out in the world.
And trust your own taste, your own wild impulses and strange hunches.
Good luck!
I met Cathal McGuire in December 2025 at Axis Ballymun where he presented his work-in-progress developed within the Axis Assemble Bursary program, blending classic ghost stories with live cameras and object theatre.
We talked about the satisfaction of seeing thing being made on stage in real time and the importance of trusting our own taste.
