Watching Meanwhile...

Sitting here behind the desk in Strange Cargo's Folkestone premises, watching over the show that a wonderful team and myself curated, I start to think a lot about the future. This is very much what I would love to be doing going forward. The experience of the whole process up to this point has been extremely beneficial to me and I really wouldn't trade anything for it. I feel that a great deal of thanks needs to go to Strange Cargo for hosting us but the majority of thanks goes to the awesome guys behind Threads. Philippa and Luke are both fantastic people to work alongside, with incredible insight and guidance along the way, they really helped us put together something quite successful.

Initially the team started off really strong and made a lot of the arrangements in no time at all, putting together the brief and the branding in one morning session. We worked incredibly well to put something together in such a small amount of time. We quickly whittled away at possible names and also the sort of work that we wanted to include in our show. We knew that it had to be an open call and we knew that we had the means to send out a question and answer form for the submissions, thank you Philippa and Luke. We found that the thing that interested us most was to have a snapshot of a persons practice as they found it at that point. This rang all sorts of bells all across the group so we quickly decided that this would be the best thing to go with. Naturally now that we had the theme the name quickly followed and we started to think of different names that went along with the in between nature of the theme. Meanwhile provided a serious but also comical return on these thoughts and we all felt that it gave it something of a theatrical theme, running with the idea of the work being live and current. After a short time longer, and me being put in charge of designing the branding, we also had a brand for our exhibition.

With the branding, I wanted to create something that was simplistic in nature and also punchy, I want with the plain black typeface as well as the idea of a time line resembling section underneath the main title. With a few tweaks and the adage of a supplementary title , we had our exhibition title.

From here we used the image I had created to roll our exhibition out over many different social media platforms as we'll as setting up the submission form for the artists to fill out.

From then on we quickly arranged a meeting to view the space, Brigitte is the artistic director of Strange Cargo, Brigitte gave us a lot of information about Strange Cargo and the space that we would be using. After a great amount of discussion between us as a group and numerous questions to Brigitte herself, we carried out a risk assessment for the space pre-show and went into Folkestone's creative quarter to spread the word about our show and make sure the surrounding area knew all about what we were doing.

All that was left to do, other than continually sharing information about the show on social media, was to wait and hope to get some submissions.

Almost instantly we had received a few submissions with many more to come, in the end we had received 80 submissions from artist as close as our own course members to international artists varying from amateur to professional.

From the point of of our exhibition this was fantastic news and we were really excited to start looking through the work, but our biggest test was about to begin.

Realising that have to whittle down all of the submissions to just over a dozen, we started to make plans as to how we could do this. Philippa had a wonderful idea in that we each choose our top six and go from there. This made our job so much more manageable and made it possible to come to a decision fairly quickly in terms of work that we mostly liked.

Coming together with shorter lists of artists meant that we allowed for a smoother transition into the final shortlist.

Rounding off a list of 13 final artists we set about sending congratulations to those that were selected as well as apologies to those that didn't. This proved to be fairly difficult as we had grown to like a lot of the work submitted to us and we had to say goodbye to most of it. Although this then allowed us to open up a dialogue with the artists we had chosen to procure the work they had submitted.

Interestingly enough, almost half of the work ended up being digital meaning we had the potential to do something really different.

Here comes a visitor, i'll have to cut this short for now...