Well! I can officially say that I have curated a successful textile exhibition! How exciting is that? Another notch on my life skills tool belt.
I'm so pleased that it went well and was received so well by the visitors who came. Some of them drove for over an hour to get to the exhibition and there were many friends and acquaintances from groups that I've taught workshops at or given talks to so I was over the moon that they thought our little self organised space was interesting enough to come and visit.
The weekend seemed to take ages to actually arrive. Isobel Moore and I were talking about it over a year ago and making vague plans in a coffee shop over cake. Then, towards the end of last year things got a bit more serious and picked up again. The other artists were chosen and invited at the beginning of this year and suddenly it was all hands on deck to get the information out, decide where each person was going to display, find out what they needed, advertise, arrange workshops, invite visitors and spread the word.
I must give a huge amount of credit (and thanks) to Helen, the arts director for the Arts for Wellbeing programme at Victoria Pavilion Arts (part of the Sussex Support Service) who had rented us the space. She did an enormous amount of work for us, organising the marketing, doing social media posts on their Facebook/Instagram pages and tagging us in all of the posts. She sent out newsletters, initial emails to invite the artists (as they are well known for artistic events so we thought it would be taken more seriously if she approached them first), got flyers printer for us and gave us lots of advice in the various meetings we had with her.
They hold all kinds of creative workshops and events through Victoria Pavilion Arts so they are well worth a follow in case a workshop comes up that tickles your fancy.
We had nine textile artists display their work, including myself and Izzy. Dawn Johnson, Jennifer Grant, Katharine Rabson Stark, Melissa Kosar, Marilyn Willis and Ana Kirby. (Links on each name for you to look them up.)
All of us are completely different! Different approaches, styles, methods of working - but all using textiles and threads and colour, which is how the exhibition name, cleverly come up with by Izzy, was born. There was a Common Thread between us all.
I took more videos than photos it seems - you can find the reels about the exhibition on my Instagram or Facebook - so these are the only few photos I have. The above is Dawn's work, she makes the most amazing art rugs which can either be hung on the wall or actually used as a rug. She also dabbles with fabric collage and stitched pictures among other things.
Below is Izzy's work, lots of beautiful recycled textiles and papers machine stitched with trimmings and other found bits. By the sounds of things she's a bit of a magpie, and an even worse fabric hoarder than myself!
Both of them sold some original pieces which was amazing!
Above is some of Jennifer's work, although she had much bigger pieces hanging on the wall which had brilliant textures in - they were kind of layered, machine stitched and then cut into and destroyed to make a different texture which was really interesting.
Oo, here's some of mine. We all had about three metres of wall space (I'd taken the floor plan and worked out where everyone would fit) so I had a bigger wall to the left of this table, and then a few little spots on here. The building is actually the top half of a cricket pavilion so there are lots of quirky eaves and funny shaped walls to fit in with. For gallery purposes they have installed picture rails in every available space, but other than that you can't have things on the walls, or use blu-tac, so it is slightly limiting where you can have things. We made it work though.
Aside from that, both days were really well attended. I think we had around 250 people through the door and there seemed to be a constant hum and buzz of people. I had some brilliant conversations or catch-ups with those walking round and it was so nice to see all of the hugging and smiling taking place! Lots of connections were made or re-established and there were no awkward moments or absolute silences. Art was being purchased, business cards taken, newsletters subscribed to and workshops signed up for as well! Even The Mother signed up to one of Melissa's slow stitching workshops further into the year.
The hubbub was definitely helped by having workshops running through the weekend. These were over subscribed - we had initially said a maximum of eight per workshop but I think I ended up with twelve on mine and all of the others had extra people snuck onto corners of tables. It was part of the success I think because some people who lived further away, who may not have come just to look at some textiles, definitely came because they had signed up for a workshop, paid their £10 to cover material costs and stayed for a whole morning/afternoon. A couple of people had signed up to all four workshops because it was such good value and thoroughly enjoyed the different processes.
On Saturday we had Melissa teaching a stitch journaling workshop in the morning, and Marilyn a sashiko one in the afternoon. Then on Sunday Izzy was teaching an intuitive stitch workshop in the morning and I had a Stitchscape one in the afternoon.
When I wasn't teaching a workshop I was helping to steward, although I wasn't there the whole time, we all kind of dipped in and out. I did stay all day on Sunday though as I forgot to leave over lunch. Luckily the VPA have a pop up cafe on these events so I could purchase some cake for lunch (needs must) and there was a steady stream of coffees during the day.
I had also taken a big shell hoop to stitch in case there were any quieter moments, or to act as a conversation starter. It was the one I'd been working on during Artwave last year at The Stitching Post (still not anywhere near finished) and it was a really good way to show people what the Stitchscapes look like before they're polished and framed.
For my afternoon workshop I had put together simple little packs with 10cm hoops in - we only had an hour and a half per workshop (although they were all overrunning because people didn't want to leave) so it was quite quick. Some absolutely gorgeous results coming out though!
I am still buzzing from the whole event I think. It would be brilliant to do it again and I do have a few ideas on how to perhaps improve it, or to make it a bigger event, involve others...but I'm trying to reign myself in. It wouldn't be until about 2027 anyway I think to give people time to build up new work. We had such lovely comments in the visitors book, thank you to everyone who took the time to write a little something - they've all be shared with the artists and VPA.
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