Well…. we’ve registered : http://www.independentsbiennial.org/2012/07/18/2012-registered-group-scibase/
Easy as it looks to get to this stage, actually took months and months of planning. The ideas we had formulated had to be changed so dramatically, as venue after venue that we had been chasing, faced either extreme financial difficulties , or just disappeared off the planet. It really was a scary thought that we had received this funding from ACE and other sponsors, but had nowhere to go.
Getting into the swing of blogging again, will take some effort, so I’m just touching base here and letting everyone know – ACE in particular (!) that we are still here and we are moving forward.
Moving on to stage two of our big plan is getting increasingly complicated. It seemed easy enough – go to Stockholm with artwork, meet lots of nice artists, plan exhibition with group and new artists for later in year.
So… for the last few months, Bruce and I have been looking at venues both in Liverpool and Leeds to stage a series of exhibitions. This gives the project more flexibility and can in theory involve more artists. Tough finding spaces though, when so many are closing down due to lack of funding! We are working towards the Independents Biennial for the Liverpool programme: http://www.independentsbiennial.org/ so once the venues are confirmed, I can register the group. This eats up a fair bit of our budget, but I just think it’s the easiest way to publicise ourselves ( being on the Indie website and the free map that will be given out to all that visit during the Biennial period) This also fits with the ACE funding guidelines.
For some reason though, I’m now getting a lot of emails from overseas artists that want to exhibit with us. I’m presuming they picked up our details from the SUPERMARKET website or catalogue – which is good and proves that our trip out there was worthwhile…… but dealing with even more artists is a full time commitment and I simply just don’t have the time. All we can do, is put them on our mailing list, ask them to follow our facebook page : https://www.facebook.com/?ref=tn_tnmn#!/pages/SCI/170190669682733 and we’ll advertise our callouts that way.
ACE – if you are reading this, I will try to post more often in this blog, but I’d rather have concrete news than just writing for the sake of it.
It almost seems that Stockholm is a distant memory now as we have well and truly returned back to earth.
The ACE funding arrived the day after we got back, so credit cards were maxed out to fill that interim gap. If things had been different and I could have filled in that application form earlier – I would have done. But things were as they were and the application form was filled in when it was, so we had to manage as best we could. More artists went across there than we originally planned, so we helped as many out as we could financially.
We’d booked two rooms in a hostel, so we could accommodate almost everyone. Others stayed with friends or decided on a cheap hotel on the other side of town. I think they regretted that, as our hostel was really quite luxurious. I’d never stayed in a hostel before, so was expecting the worst. Our rooms were really quite nice though and with us 3 females sharing a 4 bed room, it gave us plenty of space. With exorbitant prices in Stockholm, the large kitchen downstairs was well used by our group – but strangely, not many other people.
Kimbal had arrived from his long journey well ahead of us. Bike riding until it got too hard and hitchhiking the rest of the way while sleeping out in freezing conditions – his experiences were played out to a large audience at Supermarket. They’d given us one of the lecture theatres for his talk and he received a large cheer when he’d run though the images and finished talking.
I still haven’t returned all of the work to the artists. I had to go back to work the day after I got back and every day after that has sort of blurred into another. I know that I have been chasing up venues to tour our exhibition to during the Liverpool Biennial ( as has Bruce, with Leeds venues) and I know that I have been working flat out to finish work for an installation I am doing for the Chapel Gallery, Lancs., which will open in 3 weeks ( Cripes!!) ( Journeys)http://www.chapelgallery.org.uk/current_exhibitions.html
But the rest of my time is anyone’s guess.
If only I could win the lottery, I could structure my days much better than this : /
Attitudes to Art…. Just a tad different to ours in Sweden. The first thing we noticed was the entrance fee to SUPERMARKET – 100SEK or 150SEK with a catalogue ( roughly £9.60 / £14.41 ) I know from experience of working in a gallery that people grumble about paying a fiver for even a big name artist here, and yet the fair was packed with people every day – all clutching their catalogues.
It also appeared that children there were taught at a very early age to respect artworks. Sunday, like here, seemed to be a family day. Rather than allowing their children to treat artworks as glorified climbing frames ( again, something I’ve sadly witnessed)… the children ran up to the work and stopped abruptly to look for their parents approval before going any nearer.
This was quite a pleasant surprise as we jumped up to protect Phill Hopkins fragile match stick house or Julie Dodd’s building blocks, expecting the worst. Nothing at all was touched by youngsters. Adults did pick stuff out of curiosity (again, Julie’s blocks) but all very carefully.
There was a children’s workshop running upstairs and as I was busy watching what they were doing, I hadn’t noticed what the two female workshop leaders were wearing, until they stood up. One was in a bra and short skirt, the other in a fish net body stocking – nothing else. I think my eyes nearly popped out of my head when I realised it, but no one else seemed to bat an eyelid. Hmm… would we get away with that when we plan our next series of workshops? Maybe not.
The final thing was sales….. As it wasn’t a selling event, we hadn’t put prices on anything or even thought about what we would do if anyone was interested. Phill’s matchbox house and small box of sand was the first item to attract interest. No… we haven’t got a price for it. No we can’t sell it as we couldn’t contact the artist straight away…. Andrew Crighton’s photograph and Jacqueline Kerr’s drawing were all enquired about. Crazy. You couldn’t flog an artwork in the UK if you sold it for peanuts!
It’s another world out there.
A comment just made on my facebook page brought back the ‘fun’ side of the Stockholm trip. I’d been moaning so much in the last couple of days about being tired and that my back ached, that people were starting to comment that perhaps I hadn’t enjoyed it. It was probably that I just didn’t enjoy being in work to be honest…but today I’m off, the sun is out and I can catch up with a few ‘good’ things, while shutting off the few ‘annoying’ ones.
So I’d written my status on facebook as ‘homeward bound’ a few days ago ( when I was actually travelling home) and Bruce from Basement Arts had written a comment about Simon and Garfunkel and the ‘annoying whistling from the booth next door’.
The Booth next to us at Supermarket – ArtMobile: http://www.artmobile.se/ had a tape recorder in a basket with a wig over it. It had recorded whistling…various tunes. This would have been great if we hadn’t been sat next to it almost constantly for 3 days running…. but anyone who has ever invigilated, will know how annoying something like that can be after a while.
So in the last few days, we have made a few new facebook friends from people we met there – including the owner of the booth. She made a comment about our comments, but hopefully she saw the funny side.
It would be difficult to jot down absolutely everything that happened as it would be just too much to read, never mind write about. The gist of it was though, we met a lot of people, made a lot of new contacts….met old friends ( Jet from Small Projects, where we exhibited last year and got the idea of coming to Stockholm from)….and saw some really amazing art.
The South Africans – BlankProjects: http://www.blankprojects.com/ continued to take the ‘P’ out of us, but we got to understand their humour and saw the funny side.
There is a lot of documentation I need to do for the ACE funding and I’ll make a start on that in the next few days. There are also plans to be made for our next project – our response to Stockholm, but again, that will happen in the next few days.
Images of the trip and our booth can be seen on our facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=683985948#!/pages/SCI/170190669682733
