‘Mountain Whispers’ Banff Artist In Residence

One of my aims during this residency was to use it as a springboard to: Develop an online presence and investigate new audiences for my work.

I’ve principally done this by creating a crowdfunding campaign (through crowdfunding site sponsume) and in turn I’ve used that to promote my website, which until then few people had visited.

Crowdfunding is very a time consuming process. As it was my first time, I set a realistic target of £500. Raising this relatively small amount, meant that at times I may of questioned whether it was worth it—comparing the amount of time spent to the revenue raised. However, from the beginning, I decided to see it as a platform for creating an online audience rather than an income generator. The good thing about crowdfunding as a marketing and audience development tool, is that at all stages you are in complete control.

I made the presentation of my work as professional as possible, despite knowing that this time round my appeal would mostly be seen by people that knew me (personally or professionally) and my core ‘backers’ would be people that knew me really well and wanted to support me.

Audience development

I might think of ‘the audience’ while in the process of making any work, but often in my practice this has been towards the end, when I’m in the process of exhibiting. The very nature of crowdfunding means that the audience can be ‘present’ through the process of creation. I say ‘can be’, because not everyone approaches it in the same way. Some artists are seeking funds for the production of artworks, or costs for framing completed artworks for exhibition. Also the range of ‘rewards’ offered to ‘backers’ varies.

I did a lot of research about crowdfunding before deciding what the best approach for me would be. I wanted to provide a range of quality artworks even at the most inexpensive end—not simply provide a signed postcard. My crowdfunding audience enabled me to think about ways that people could access and own a piece of my work. As an artist who thinks more in terms of installation, it became more about sharing my work with people in a very direct way, and thinking of ways I could make that possible.

I also needed to feel that my backers were more than just a means of financial support; that they would have a value as an audience as the work was being created—this may have been more important to me than to them, but it’s what I needed to feel inspired. I saw it as a trial for future work and thinking about different ways that I could involve people to participate; exploring what effect they might have.

The responses I’ve had to the work, has made me think about my practice in a different way. I’ve seen how people valued the objects they chose; how much they’ve enjoyed being part of my journey; how they’ve responded to investing in me and acquiring a piece of original artwork for themselves—sometimes for the first time.

Online presence

For an individual, just starting to embark on this way of connecting with people, particularly non-arts people, I had realistic expectations. Most of my backers were friends and family, but some backers, while not complete strangers, were totally unexpected.

While many others didn’t financially support the crowdfinding campaign, they did send words of encouragement and spread the campaign through their own networks, and during the six weeks it was running it generated 1130 hits on my sponsume page.

I also saw a huge spike in regards to hits on my website. Before the residency it was an average of 20 per month, over a period of two years. For the three months (month before, during and after) that rose to 454 hits collectively.

Advice at a Q&A run by the arts council about grants for the arts, suggested that as an individual, audience development might not mean huge numbers, and that is true in my case, I’ve got a very small following of people on my website now. But it’s given me a lot to think about for the future, and how I might develop further audience development.

OPEN STUDIOS

At the end of the week two we were invited to open our studios to the public at the end of week three. This was not compulsory but an invitation. This is not something that I knew before my arrival, nor did anyone mention it until week two. On reflection, I’m glad that I didn’t know about it before, it might have shaped my work in a negative way, making me face decisions too soon.

At first I was reluctant, as much of my work in the first two weeks was spent outside of the studios—in short I felt I had nothing to put on the walls. However, after an initial panic, I chose to see it as an opportunity to gather my visual material together and see what I could accomplish in a week. In the end that turned out to be a lot more than I expected.

As my work is about creating historically plausible characters who inhabit imaginary lives. The open studios gave me the opportunity to present genuine research documents alongside purely created photographic ‘evidence’. Although, I had a smaller amount of created ‘artefacts/objects’ in which to convince the audience, that didn’t seem to hinder the plausibility of the story. The audience were presented with an introduction that explained that I’d been given an award to research the life of Beatrice Emilia Wilds (the creator of the original photographs: taken in Banff in 1888) and to make my own visual response to her work. It’s a small measure of success that members of the audience were persuading me to contact those local organisations with my ‘artefacts’.

As one of my original aims was to explore how I could do this with a very limited time frame, I feel that I can judge this with a certain amount of success. I think it also reminded me of what can be achieved in such a short space of time, when you focus intensely and without any other distractions.

I also had the time to create a small series of experimental ‘contemporary’ photography/print based works that were a response to Wilds’ historical artefacts. To this I had a really positive response from all audience members including faculty and local non-arts residents. Perhaps the digital print market is different in Canada, but I had a lot of questions about how I made the work.

LAST WEEK

The open studios created a deadline a week ahead of what I originally expected. Bringing some conclusion to the research aspect of Mountain Whispers, I was able to think more clearly of what I wanted to accomplish in my last week.

I asked myself the question, ‘What is the most valuable resource here, for me at this moment?’ For me, that was the control that I had within the digital archival print studio; the immediacy of that resource and how cheap (compared to at home) that resource at Banff is.

It allowed me to play, experiment and explore. It reminded me that several times over the past few years, when doing some other project, I’ve wished to have the opportunity to just just stop and play/experiment, for a couple of days with photoshop. This was that opportunity to do so. Subsequently, this had led to me discovering some new things, but also reminding me of some old things that I used to do. My last week was spent printing a series of the largest digital works, experimenting with different colours and varied effects.

The residency has enabled me to build some new photographic work, but it’s also allowed me, to employ some old skills/aesthetics that I’d forgotten about, namely printmaking. However, the printmaking I’ve now been experimenting with is of the digital variety, and the response that I had at the open studios, has encouraged me to continue exploring this at home.