Working the exhibition

I was allocated to staff the exhibition on Saturday from 1.30-5.  For the first hour I was on my own, so I used this time to look at each exhibit in detail, and write down what I made of the work.  This was time well spent.  I concluded that the jewellery and ceramics on display was generally strong work, but that the textile work was generally weak.  This surprises me a bit as we have several textile tutors, only one jewellery tutor, and I am not sure whether there is a tutor for ceramics and glass at all.  I know the jewellery and ceramics students have complained about lack of support and that Antje has tried to address this. 

Many of the artists statements were ok for first attempts, but many of them had punctuation, and grammatical errors.  I think this could be improved if, one person who is good at grammar, proof-read and corrected all of them, prior to another person printing and mounting them all.  Beth had done an excellent job of printing and mounting all the artist statements, and had a consistent layout and photos for all students.  Some of us (ie me!)  had dreadful personal photos, so this needs to be addressed before we exhibit for our final year show.

Having reviewed everyone's work, I made the following comments about my own work. "Artist statement does not explain why "yokes" is the title. Shorter artist statement works better (c100 words) but needs to be refined.  Hanging pole should have been round so hangers sit better.  No business card.  Poor photo on artist statement".  I will be addressing all the above points for my final year show! 

During the 4 hours I was there, there were only about 6 visitors.  I think we need to improve our publicity, consider who we want to visit, consider what is the purpose of the exhibition, and target accordingly.  For me, the purpose is to gain experience of setting up an exhibition; publicise the work of the individual artists; publicise the course at UH; and have a good time at the private view - in that order.  Therefore it is important to get more people visiting at the weekend, to make it worth staffing it.  Otherwise you would just hire the room for the Friday evening for a bit of a jolly, and take everything down immediately.  I think we need to identify who is likely to visit on Saturday and Sunday, (potential students and teachers from the local area?) and make sure they are aware of our event.  Can we get flyers into local A level art classrooms?  Could we get access to data that identifies where students who are local residents, went to school?  What about a bit of historical trend analysis?