Christmas student end-of-year show at Carpet Pages Gallery

I am honoured to have unique, gritty, determined, talented and committed students and so I propose this opportunity for you:

There’s an empty gallery in the middle of the desert ready and waiting for your beautiful works to transform it into an oasis. Let’s do an end-of-year Christmas student show at my Carpet Pages Gallery!

• You do not have to have taken every single course, but enough of a handful so that I have gotten to know you and your work and have a feel for it (curation is a lot about feeling)

• + You DO have to have some finished work! So… vroom vroom vroom!

• Your work(s) don’t have to be for sale if you don’t want to (you can mark them as NFS - not for sale); gallery commission is very low

• + You DO have to have a high quality, high resolution photograph of your piece(s)

This is a unique opportunity to show your work online to a wide and global audience so I invite and encourage you to submit! I’ll discuss the works to show with you and guide you through good exhibition practice. Not in a show-offy way, but in the spirit of the sincere generosity of sharing your works. It’s a great chance for some of your works to meet each other and sit (or hang) together in an online space, as some of your paintings may never otherwise meet. Hang out together virtually and see what new connections can be made!

I’d like to start the ball rolling with a curated selection of some of your Faces paintings. I think it’s also an ideal space to show the Travelling Apprentice piece when it’s done along with some supporting ephemera to show the progress of the piece, in a separate show of its own, but I don’t want to put any pressure on you to finish it by the end of this year.

Here’s the rough example gallery programme:

• Dec 2021: Faces show

• Summer 2022: Travelling Apprentice

• Dec 2022: Flora

• Dec 2023: Fauna (or whatever the theme of the courses are that year)

• Etc etc

This way it gives you something to work towards and a valuable chance to exhibit your work. What’s art for? What’s the function of painting? These are questions I’m currently asking myself for my PhD too and I know some of you have also been thinking of the same. It will be a nice record of lockdown/pandemic/year together and memories of our wonderful times painting faces this year as a rolling group. So…

EITHER

I own the Carpet Pages gallery, but I don’t own the software that it’s built in (tech conundrum). Therefore, even though it’s mine, I still have to pay the developer to actually ‘install’ and upload all the works, and I also have to pay for the web hosting for the show to be live, after which the show will be downloadable for free forever. So there will be a fee involved for participation - for the tech as above (I’m very happy to do all the curation and exhibition making for free for my students but I just have to pay for the tech and web costs). If the costs are shared among all the artists it should be fairly affordable.

OR

You wait for me to get my coding skills up to a sufficient degree that I can do the installation myself. However, although I am actually being taught coding at UCL, I don’t think I’ll be able to do it in time for Dec 2021. And I do like the idea of a Dec 2021 show, so I recommend the former.

Timeline:

• Sept 2021: Use a Miniature Monthly Meeting to discuss plans

• Oct 2021: Participants work on gathering all required photos and info together (and I can help you along with this if you’ve never written an artist’s statement etc)

• End Oct 2021: I have to receive all finished photos and info

• Nov 2021: I work on collating all the content in a spreadsheet, work on the curation, make the show, guide and mentor you through the exhibition process, liaise with developer for installation, write the introduction to the show, organise a private view opening reception etc etc

• Early Dec 2021: Show opens!

How does that sound? I’m quite excited already!