Monday 13 September
It’s difficult to say when to start a blog, as although this week heralds the start of working together as a team for the first time, getting to this stage has taken a year of planning.
The four of us: Jane Hughes, Sue Meyerhoff Sharples, Christine O’Reilly Wilson and Wendy Williams, knew each other through the exhibition circuit. We liked and admired each others work and each had a strong exhibition background.
We knew from working individually on previous Biennials, that all venues in Liverpool get booked up very early at this time of year, so began the look out for spaces last summer.
We needed a venue that was large and airy enough to give each of us space around each of our works and it was fortunate that we heard about a new gallery opening at that time. http://www.thegalleryliverpool.co.uk/
The gallery was booked for the opening month of the Biennial…..and the planning began.
On arriving at the gallery at our alloted time, we wanted to change the look of the space so that the emphasis could be shifted from its usual commercial use, to an Independent Biennial host venue.This meant moving the temporary walls within the gallery to open up the space and to change it’s dynamics. We lost a day in terms of being able to hang the work because of this, but the results were worth it.
The preconceived ideas we had about where each work should be situated before the exhibition had to be re thought. Most of the artists wanted clean white walls and a lot of space around the work, but this was a debatable issue – not just within the artists group, but also with how the gallery usually works. Big decisions and compromises were made.
We also decided against the ‘usual system’ for this gallery, to have wall panels and labels next to the work. This was too distracting.
It meant extra work in placing numbers next to each work and then typing up a list, but this helped with the ‘clean’ look we originally aimed for.
