25/03/2022 – DIY Exhibition

Starting out on the MA, one of the intentions I had with completing the course was to pick up more professional/exhibition skills. When I pictured this, I was seeing clean spaces and particular curation skills. While I haven’t got to do much exhibition/showing of work thus so far, any that has been done has been through group crits/organising the studio to show work.

However, a couple of friends had suggested we put together an exhibition of our work in a DIY immediate way.

We scoped out the space, which ended up being the Drawing Room at Grays, and we chose a day – we discussed it on the Monday and Tuesday, and the exhibition was going to happen on the Friday evening.

As we never *technically* booked the drawing room, we only had a couple of hours before we had invited people to set up. This is where I found the challenge and the DIY aspect: the curation decision was based on us all just picking a space each and putting any work of our choice in it.

To have little time and not much way to control the look of the exhibition, for it not to be a perfect clean room was a definite change of pace for me. Any experience I have had with setting up work to be viewed in the past has involved days of choosing which work to include, where the perfect place for it is. Changing the way in which I envision seeing my work beyond the studio was a beneficial way to imagine it beyond the space of a white cube, or large installation, but in relation to other work and an alternate space.

By spontaneously putting the work together in the space, I quickly found different ways to present my work that I otherwise wouldn’t have; a projector I could put still images onto to present them in a large scale format that looked almost like an enlarged medical slide. I had a sculpture on a painting palette with a photograph of the sculpture as part of a performative piece and also a costume pinned straight to the wall.

The other artists involved also had spontaneously and interestingly put their work on display: Kate made use of a misprinted zine to create a wall collage, Saoirse had put paintings on easels and set up sound equipment in order to create a sound piece while the audience were in the room, Rachael had bread sculptures laid on the floor as well as on paint palettes, Alanna had sculptural work on a low plinth found in the room, along with painting work pinned to a grate behind it and Sarah had sketchbook work pinned open to a drawing board, propped up on a drawing room donkey.

I loved the idea that work could be put into any old space and shown wonderfully and differently together, that it didn’t take masses of time and debating or even any money really.

Inviting other people to an impromptu one night art event was a lot of fun as well, people seemed to come in and stay and chat for a while – for me, being on the MA and in a studio space out the way, I find we don’t often get to talk to people outside of the course we are on, so facilitating this cross pollination and getting feedback on the work from other people was absolutely a beneficial exercise and allowed to see the work in different lights and through the eyes of others. I mean, this is what exhibitions generally do, but not many people had seen the work, not least to have seen it in a presentation like context.

I would absolutely do an exhibition in this way again, as there was much less anxiety/stress in the organisation, and instead of it being an exercise to be completed or have an ulterior motive, it genuinely was fun. Being with other artists all just with the intention of putting our work up for showing other people, having a drink and creating a space where we could talk about our work and consequently be introduced to other students work was great, and something I wish was done/encouraged more at Grays.