Lighting the touch paper…

Council contact on sick, council contact now on fortnight’s holiday, meanwhile the proposal and budget is slowly advancing amongst a pile of other work – that fuse is fizzling…

Laurence and I met together early Monday morning to work on the budget proposal for the project. We were joined by a local professional who was able to give us historical background in connection with the space for the exhibition. After a really fascinating chat he left and a curator we both know and respect arrived to discuss the possibility of working together. As both Laurence and I will be including work in the exhibition we felt it necessary to have an external curator involved from this stage. We’re delighted that she is happy to contribute and we discussed how we might to shape the show together and the possible artists that we felt we would wish to invite. Her experience has been invaluable from the first conversation, raising issues that we may not have foreseen and suggesting possibilities that we would not have thought of. We have decided to invite artists rather than have an open submission as it also provides an opportunity for us to work with artists we respect, to give a platform to emerging talent that excites us and to grow this exhibition from the ground up as it were with a smaller number of artists creating dedicated work rather than selecting fom a mass amount of submissions at a later stage. Back to the city council now as we still haven’t physically been in the space, to chase up a site visite.

The ups and downs, the successes and the setbacks, this blog will chart the progress of a project, warts and all. Whether it materialises in its entirety, whether the necessary funding can be found remains to be seen but either way this blog will document each step along the way.

Initially a number of factors came together. Both Laurence and I had been battling with the frustrations of creating art in an area which is severely inactive by way of exhibition space. A number of innovative and significant galleries have closed in recent years and this frustration began to bubble into a need for action. With support promised from a number of areas I began to explore alternative spaces. Personally this was down to a number of reasons among which was, the challenge to find an exciting alternative space to create work for, the experience of managing a full-scale project and the potential to introduce something entirely new and challenging to this under utilised area.

I made some enquiries, reached some dead ends and then contacted a city council worker who was as keen to find a facilitator for such a project as I was to find a space. The space she offered is central, packed with interest and potentially could lead to a really exciting show. I talked to Laurence and she agreed to come on board. Our first stop was the City Council who eventually suggested spring 2012 for the project to take place. From there we went to the county council who were also, in theory, very excited but on the brink of some huge staffing and funding changes at the start of this year. Should things settle in our favour though they are keen to incorporate our work into future wider plans for the area.

We then turned to art organisations in particular ARC who are based in Portsmouth. ARC have been hugely helpful, going through all aspects of budgeting and planning with us and pledging in-kind support which will bolster our case in turn with the council. And so here we are. Next on the agenda is a meeting together to thrash out the budget and proposal in more detail, discuss content with a respected curator and meet with a local professional who can fill us in on research concerning the space.