Meet the Curator day
Well, the day finally came round and although I was stupidly nervous at the start I found the hour long chat very useful on so many levels. Thanks to Emily Speed (reasons I will go into later) I met with Sara Jayne Parsons from the Bluecoat today.
A few blog posts back, I said that I name dropped to set up this meeting. It wasn’t actually as cold and calculated as that… I merely said that Emily had made a comment on one of my posts about meeting. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t tried before – Jeez, how many times (!)… but it never even occurred to me that this is a person that I don’t really know and a really good way of introducing myself would be to find common interests or associates ( as you would when meeting people normally!) Ah – so now she knew that I knew Emily and as it turned out, many, many other artists that we shared common ground with.
During our conversation, it turned out that I’d made many assumptions about myself and the people I associate with, but I don’t really know why. I have to work on that now that I’m aware of it. She is going to look at my website when she has time and suggest changes.
I can’t quote all of the things she said ( didn’t make loads of notes as I was thinking about what she was saying) but I’ll list my interpretation of the points she made so that I will be able to refer to them at a later date, and also perhaps they will be useful to other artists reading this.
Some are so bleeding obvious that I don’t know why I wasn’t doing them, some I have been subconsciously doing and not realising it, while others, I simply didn’t want to do!.
1. Make a 3 year plan. What do you want to achieve in this time?
2. Connect/ blog on a-n. ( she was full of praise for a-n)
3. Do mail outs. Now this is something I was dead against a year ago. I had a few really inane updates from artists who were sending them out twice a month and I found them annoying. However……….I had a really interesting one from Claire Weetman recently and my opinion changed. It’s very much the quality, not the quality here.
4. Network ( sigh)
5. Don’t rely on social networking. This is another interesting one as I do post up on facebook and twitter anything new I’m involved in. The problem with both is that you assume that the people ‘who matter’ are looking at daily / hourly, but they are simply not. If it’s not looked at within that hour, it’s gone. If using it though, use it sensibly and with purpose.
There is more, but I’m just going through the scribbles I made after the meeting to try to put them in some sort of order.
It did make me realise though that I have subconsciously already started on a plan. I am more selective about exhibitions and do think about collaborative projects instead (which I do because I enjoy them , not because of any ‘goal’) In the last month or so, I have done a lot of networking – more than I have ever done to be honest, but I still need to go the extra mile.
It’s going to be interesting to see if my work evolves more or my connections improve if I follow the full advice given today. My future blogs will hopefully note these changes.
