This exhibition, organised and curated by OCA’s Thames Valley group has been in the pipeline for at least 18 months and it was wonderful to see the fruits of our labours at The Lightbox in Woking for a fortnight at the beginning of February 2019. When I say the fruits of our labours, most of it was really the labours of the exhibition sub-group of Catherine, Teresa, Dawn, Sue, Jonathan and Monica. The rest of us submitted work on the theme of ‘Time’ and only had to present it and our Artists’ Statements/hanging instructions at the appropriate point. We almost all made it to the hanging up day, and it was great to finally see our efforts up on the wall in a proper gallery.
Set-up with Michael, Richard and Gerry
The Lightbox gallery is a plain room in a building which is a bit of a landmark in the town, and our exhibition coincided with a Gillian Wearing installation and Women in Photography: A History of British Trailblazers so we were hopeful that footfall would be good. Certainly, in terms of the visitor’s book, there were more comments than I had expected.
My own offering was a wall-hung lightbox of some of the work I made for Assignment 1, Remember When? I presented it as eight cut-out photographs from my father-in-law’s collection in a single large frame.
In theory, the idea was that viewers could choose to switch on and off the lightbox, which would give different meaning to the images, but the Health & Safety elves decreed that it should either be switched On or Off, which was a shame. It was the first work on the right of the entry, and so had good visibility. It was certainly eye-catching, and although I still have many doubts about it myself, it seemed to get mostly positive attention, although I did overhear one person saying she didn’t understand it at the Artists’ Evening.
Artists’ evening
I had no intention of selling the work and had not put a price on it. However, a couple of other students, Kate and Michael sold some of their work, which must have been very satisfying.
Gerry, Kate and Keith’s work for the ‘Time’ exhibition.
Overall it was a very satisfying experience, and as I have been discussing with some fellow students and notwithstanding the historical sex bias, if women don’t submit work for exhibitions and competitions because of lack of confidence, we are never going to reach a point of parity with men in art collections. (Still cannot get over the fact that only 20 of the 2300 works held by the National Portrait Gallery are by women). So I have decided to start submitting work for local events this year, and will be submitting to the Bath Festival Fringe and the Open Exhibition at the Richard Jeffreys Museum this summer. The main aim will be to practise presenting work for submission, and if I am successful that will be an added bonus.
Finally, this event gave me the push to get some business cards made, and I am inordinately proud of them. I have described myself as ‘Photographer and Paper Artist’ – something of a stretch, but I hopefully plan to become one in the future.
Things I learned from this experience:
- Work which requires a lightbox needs to have one that automatically switches on and off intermittently. It is much easier to present work in a standard format (which goes completely against the grain with me).
- Get some packing materials well in advance. My artwork packing was perfunctory and was a problem on the takedown day as it was raining heavily.
- Have a selection of work more or less ready for submissions at all times. I missed out on potentially having work at the OCA’s exhibition at the OXO Tower in London last autumn because all of the work I was happy with was already committed elsewhere.
References
Holly's Digital Image & Culture Blog 