Hello, my name is Beth Bramich and in October I will begin my third and final year of my Fine Art BA at Nottingham Trent.
Over the summer I have a placement position at Nottingham Contemporary, which began in July and will end in November. This internship is with the Public Programme and my role is to assist the curator of Public Programmes, Rob Blackson, for one day a week.
In addition to this I am the curatorial intern for Sideshow 2010, a Nottingham based festival of independent art, which will take place from the 22nd October to the 18th December. I began work on this project today and found out more about how I will be involved in the next two months of preparation and during the festival.
Since Easter 2009 I have been an intern with Tether, an independent art collective who maintain a gallery space, The Wasp Room, in Nottingham and hold events both at their HQ and in alternative venues in the UK.
I have contributed two articles to Nottingham Visual Arts, a local arts magazine. The first was a review of an exhibition curated by Walden Affairs, an art centre in Holland, earlier in the year. The second article will be published in the first printed version of Nottingham Visual Arts in September and discusses the Nottingham independent art scene and the new online archive of independent art in the UK compiled by Tether which will be released in September.
On the 12th of October the third in a series of video events ‘In Production’ that I have co-curated with Rob Blackson will take place. I am very excited that I have so far confirmed Ellie Harrison for the upcoming event. In the series so far exhibited artists have included Alia Pathan, Tracey McMasters, Simon Raven, Tether, Theo-Reeves Evison, Thomas Darby and Duncan Allen. The format for the events is to invite 3 artists to present a recent and in someway still unresolved video work with a short introduction from the artists. After the audience has seen the video work they are then involved in a discussion which is led by a few key questions from the artist. The aim of the events is to showcase video artists in the Midlands and to create a forum for constructive critical feedback.
That is an almost complete introduction to my current activity. I am not from Nottingham originally and this is my first summer in my university town. I decided to stay so that I could take advantage of the opportunities in the local art scene in the run up to Sideshow, as well as working with the new Nottingham Contemporary as they prepare for the British Art Show.
It is my ambition to pursue a career in curation after I finish my degree. I am looking into possibly continuing my education with post-graduate study in Gallery Studies and Curation but I am still considering my options.
The Fine Art degree at Nottingham Trent is very open and encourages self direction and professional ambition. My current practice attempts to merge the role of the artist and curator, my research attempts to support my curatorial interests by discovering more about exhibition design, appropriation, exhibitions as a medium, (interior) architecture, installation and narratives between objects/images/contexts. That’s a very imperfect list. I need to start finding a way to articulate my interests and how they will lead over the next 9 month to work for my degree show.
I’ve been recommended starting a blog a few times to help me organise my ideas and keep an archive of artists and exhibitions that I would like to write about. I hope that it will be useful in this way. I’m optomistic but nervous about the next year and certain that time will pass very quickly for me.
