I’ve been a member of Visual Arts Network for around 6 months now. It’s an organisation and charity that is made up of artists and creatives around the Shropshire area, there is a gallery in the shopping centre and exhibitions are regularly put on to display the talents of the artists and members.
I joined VAN after being a part of the Shrewsbury Arts Trail Photography Exhibition last year (2024) and the VAN group were helpful at collecting the works for the displaying and then allowing me to pick them up after the take-down had completed.
Their website has. a list of the artists who are currently members and offers an insight into their practices and output, so it might prove to be a good networking source as well as an opportunity to learn from others about how they practice their art.
Volunteer
I’ve never exhibited anything in the VAN Gallery, which is in the Darwin Shopping Centre in the Shrewsbury Town Centre. To qualify to exhibit you must meet some of the criteria specified and one of them is that you should volunteer once every six weeks for a shift in the gallery/shop. I went in January to begin my volunteering with the gallery and was inducted to the ways of the shop and the building before then being allowed to return for more shifts.
Now I’ve completed three shifts, the latest one this past Sunday afternoon, I am happy to exhibit works. I have placed a few copies of my zines car park and shutdown on the tables in the gallery in the hope that someone walking past may like looking at photos of car parks or insides of a factory in the darkness.
Exhibiting
I’ve been offered the chance also to hire an “Artists Board” for a month which sees a space on the gallery wall of the size of 8×4 feet being available to hang up my 2D works, photographs and if I wanted, some paintings.
It was time to select some work to hang so I brought down a lot of my work from the previous couple of years and began by photographing everything. Then I measured them all to allow me to produce a scale version of each and then see what they looked like together.
Most of the prints are from Shrewsbury Arts Trail, or University Exhibitions so they are bigger than A4 and in a couple of cases are quite large..
As you can see from the picture above, I had a few different series of images that I felt like I wanted to exhibit and perhaps sell.
The board being 8×4 is indicated as the pencil ldrawn rectangle and then the images within it are the chosen photos. There are two from my Dudley Zoo Redscale series and under those, three from my Japan adventure in Jan 2024. Up the left side is a set of three images of buildings, one being the fire station tower and then a steel house and a shot from a derelict housing estate in London. On the right hand side are four more abstract images. The two lower are shots of the Orange Walls and Ceilings in the Barbican centre and above those are some photos from a past degree show of a trampoline that had been threaded and a black and white section of a wall where there were different textures and colours that intrigued me at the time.
The other photos around the edge that I left out were the large acrylic photos of a factory at night and then some other random sets that I had exhibited at the Shrewsbury Arts Trail.
Once I’d selected the images I chose to make cards for the walls using the template we’re told to use. I had to make two of each, one for the wall and one for the rear of the work. I printed these out in top quality paper so that it wasn’t a screwed up piece of paper stuck on the wall, trying to keep up the appearance of someone who knows what they’re doing.
With my selection made it was time to head to the gallery on the Monday morning before I went to university, with agreement of the lecturers of course.
I had organised with the trustees of the gallery to be there first thing on Monday, and as I know the keylocker code I was able to let myself in and begin hanging on the board that was left available.
As I wanted to gain the position for the centre of the board I measured it and found to my horror that the board was not in fact 8×4 but 7×4. This meant I would need to rejig a few items so I began by hanging the two large redscale images and then work out from there what space was left to each side.
It was also tricky to hang on this board as there was a “makers space” underneath it that I was paranoid about, especially with hammers, nails and framed images going up and down…
I did trim it down in the end and as you can see from the picture below, I had to remove a few images from the display.
Each of these works were hung using nails into the board on the wall and everything sat nicely apart from the two orange photos on the bottom left, I had to use a “sticky dot” to prevent them from spinning to an unlevel attitude, this was due to the hardware on the rear of the fram, they had table top egs that could fold out too.
I chose to leave the other two abstract photos off and alsoe the two buildings that went along with the fire station tower.
It was surprising that a seemingly small amount of length taken off the board can make such a difference to the proposed images hung on there.
You can see that I also had an artist’s statement on the board for members and members of the public to learn a little more about me and my practice.
Over the month that the works were hanging a few people had a look at some of them but there were no purchases made on anything other than my zines which are elsewhere in the same gallery. I think that my style of photography maybe doesn’t fit with the overall aesthetic of the VAN Gallery.
The other option is that people just didn’t want to buy one of my photos which is understandable. they’re not in everybody’s wheelhouses that is for sure. I had some interesting comments from other volunteers saying that they enjoyed the big bold colors and that it was something different to the usual, which was also visible from the window and this may have upped numbers of visitors.
When it came to the end of the month, it was time to remove the works from the wall and get it safely home, unfortunately I ended up in hospital with a serious infection so the team at the gallery very helpfully took it all down and stored it safely in the basement, where it will stay until I get to it, so i can pack it up and then bring it home.
Reflection
Overall it was a good experience of communicating with the gallery trustee, curator, and then the other volunteers. I found it useful to learn about the layout of the works on a physical piece of paper as pictured at the top, and then when the size of wall was wrong, I had to roll with the punch and work out an alternative way of presenting my work.
It was a good way to use the large redscale images that I made for The Matter Of The Black Country exhibition and to get them exhiibited in a non-uni environment.
I have learned lessons from this exercise too, such as not trusting the measurements of the location until you’ve checked it out physically. The other boards in the room are all 8ft long and this solo one is only 7ft long. Typical.
I have learned about the presentation of the works to fit in with the scheme of the gallery, and their standards, in terms of title cards, stickers and inclusion on the gallery stock sheets. The stock sheets enable the volunteers and staff to know whose work is whose and how much they are if the cards are lost. The processing of purchases is also something I’ve picked up as I’d not really done this before.
Be First to Comment