BLUE MONKEY BREAKFAST TALK
Well here’s a first! On Tuesday I gave a breakfast talk to the Eastbourne and District Chamber of Commerce. This was quite challenging in some ways. For one thing it was day 4 of a very sore throat for me and for another, the event started at 7am. Now this is not a time at which I normally expect to be on top form, however a quick dose of Paracetamol temporarily sorted the throat, and an appropriate sense of professionalism kicked in and, I think, managed to make me rise to the occasion.
Actually, it was a really interesting morning. The 20 or so members of the local business community who arrived looking extremely sprightly and threw themselves into vigorous networking at 7am, settled down to tuck into a splendid breakfast at one of Eastbourne’s most comfortable hotels. By 8 oclock everyone had given a really punchy little one minute presentation or update on their business and it was my turn to introduce myself and Blue Monkey Studio and Network in a 10 minute talk. It was great to be able to give a quick potted history of some of the things we’ve done at Blue Monkey Studio over the past 10 years with an emphasis on the events and exhibitions we’ve organised. The final part of my talk focused on the breadth and diversity of the Network’s membership and I showed a selection of images from some of our artists with work ranging across traditional arts media and stretching to other disciplines including music, performance and poetry. I also talked about our aims for the future including finding ways of making new opportunities for members to show their work and trying to provide more support for our artists to develop and try out new ideas in a supported environment.
I really enjoyed meeting these people who were friendly, interested and welcoming. There seemed a genuine interest in building links between the arts and business communities in the area and this is something I am most certainly keen to encourage and support. Not only that, but I had a jolly good breakfast and was home, changed and ready to go to the studio by 9.30am for a full day’s work.
Thanks EDCC. It was nice to meet you.
IT’S BUDDY TIME!
It’s been quite a few months for Blue Monkey Network since I last wrote on our blog. As I’ve said before, the busier it gets, the less time there is for blogging, which is disappointing when there’s such a lot to tell. So maybe it’s time for more delegation! I’ve decided I will invite our members to send me contributions which I can add to the blog so that we can get more news out there about the exciting things we are doing.
My last post was to celebrate the occasion of our 1st birthday in June 2012. Since then I am very pleased to say that we have been awarded a Grant For The Arts which has enabled us to really enhance our events programme this year, and also to introduce a couple of new professional development initiatives for artists.
So far we’ve been able to use our grant to invite interesting speakers and facilitators to our monthly events, but this month is the start of something completely new! We’re starting a six week long buddying scheme for which 14 of our members have been paired up to support each other in their practices in various ways under the watchful eye of Buddy Facilitator Anne Barrell. We’ve just been going through the applications and now we’re informing all the Buddies who they’ve been paired with and the next step is for each person to introduce themselves to their buddy. The whole group (or as many as possible of them) will be meeting up in three weeks time with Anne to talk about how to get their buddying partnerships off to a start and what they want to achieve. I’m excited about what might come of this!
BLUE MONKEY NETWORK 1ST BIRTHDAY – come and celebrate with us!
As we approach our first birthday we’d like to say a BIG THANK YOU to everyone who has supported us during the past year, whether by becoming a member, taking part in our events, offering advice, or giving financial or in kind support. A special thank you must go, of course, to our partner, Towner, without whom we could not exist, and to a-n who awarded us a NAN Futurific bursary and were our only financial supporters during our first year.
We’re very proud and pleased to have achieved so much in a single year. We now have around 80 members and we really hope that we’ve been able to offer them some stimulating opportunities to meet new people and develop their practices and, perhaps, we’ve been able to offer a little food for thought too. We’ve been able to introduce numerous arts managers, organisers, educators and curators to our members; at least 17 of our artist members have presented their work for discussion at Blue Monkey events; 8 members were successful in being selected for the East Sussex Open and many of our artists and makers have achieved individual success in a range of high profile, national exhibitions and events.
We will be holding a special first birthday networking event on Thursday 28 June from 6 – 8pm at Towner, so we’d love to invite any artists within a reasonable distance of Eastbourne to come and celebrate with us. All welcome and we’d be very excited to see you! Always keen to make the most of opportunities we will, of course, be inviting lots of interesting people for you to meet and introduce yourself to!
http://www.townereastbourne.org.uk/event/blue-monk…
If you can’t make it to Towner, why not keep in touch through our Facebook Group http://www.facebook.com/groups/111416068946940/
NETWORK CATCH UP
Trawling through the Network e-mails I was answering a question from someone enquiring about NAN Networking Artists Networks which they’d seen acknowledged on our promotional cards. I clicked on the link to the NAN page, only to find… MY NAME… and a link to this blog in the middle of the page. Stricken with guilt about the huge absence of blog posts, I’m prompted to add this Network update! Of course the problem is that the more successful projects become, the busier life is and the less time there is for blogging!
However, I’m happy to report that we now have a grand total of 65 Blue Monkey Network members from across Sussex. We’ve been up & running for 7 whole months now, during which time we run 7 regular monthly events including an amazingly successful professional development weekend in partnership with Matt Roberts Arts during which Matt managed a spectacular total of 14 1-2-1 portfolio reviews and a talk on How To Apply For Open Submissions and Awards. More than 40 people attended the talk and many, unfortunately, had to be turned away such was the demand.
A small team of our members also had an absolutely unique opportunity during the autumn to curate an exhibition of works from the Towner Collection. The exhibition, New Eyes, has been a resounding success and can be seen at Towner until 22 April. The six members of the team found the project an unforgetable experience and put in a huge amount of effort, but reaped a rich reward in terms of professional development experience, insight, understanding and knowledge.
We’re now working towards our second year as a Network and planning and fundraising in an effort to move forward with our big ideas and plans for the future. We hope to move onwards and upwards with even more opportunties for artists in the coming months and years. We’ll keep you posted!
http://www.townereastbourne.org.uk/exhibition/new-…
http://www.townereastbourne.org.uk/events/artist-n…
EXCITING NEWS FOR BLUE MONKEY MEMBERS!
We are very excited to say that Towner has invited members of the Network to curate the next Towner Collection exhibition. Towner holds one of the most significant public art collections in the South East. It boasts in excess of 4,000 works of art by historic, modern and contemporary artists including Vanessa Bell, David Bomberg, Tacita Dean, Olafur Eliasson, Anya Gallaccio, Henry Moore, Grayson Perry, Pablo Picasso, And Wolfgang Tillmans.
So, we’re inviting members to apply for the opportunity to be part of the Blue Monkey Network Curatorial team to work with Towner to curate the exhibition which will be on display from October to April 2012 at Towner.
What a great chance to work with an ambitious and aspirational professional organisation & put together a show from an amazing collection of work. Wow!
So, we hope that our members are as ambitious as Towner and as excited as we are!
http://www.townereastbourne.org.uk/about-us/our-st…
