Monday meeting with Lucy Drane, Alias advisor and Gallery Co-ordinator / Co-ordinator of Spike Island Associates Programme at Works|Projects / Spike Island.
Sitting in our kitchen drinking Love Tea with Lucy who is unhurried and focused – while we have gone a bit muddled and lacklustre.
It takes a while for us to explain what we have begun to scope out as the next Smooth Space project. We have been talking it round and round together through the summer and have lost clarity. We have 2 distinct strands of activity – an artist’s residency and a series of talks/conversations – but they seem to be pulling in 2 separate directions which means that when we try to plan funding strategies we are not sure how to pitch each part of the activity/where they should fall.
Lucy’s response is clear and straightforward – make the talks/conversations part of the residency project. Start with the host venue and what we want to get out of access/being present there. Then have repeat events throughout the residency that relate to residency activity – 12 talks, happening monthly, engaging a contemporary visual art audience and developing Torbay’s cultural profile on a regional level. Consider how this would help other local practitioners.
We ask a very practical question – if you are planning a peripatetic series of talks, where do you start ie do we approach guest artists/curators first? How do you pitch an idea to an invited speaker when the project is still in very bare bones? How do we go about it?
Again Lucy is brilliantly clear – start by mapping out a list of venues. The programme of venues will shape the talks themselves – we should be ambitious and make a coherence between venue, location and invited artist/curator according to work/interests
The talks could also be a way for us to expand our network – as we could invite organisations from outside Torbay that we might want to connect with. Lucy talks about us trying to build and support an artist’s network in Torbay with further activities during the residency. She mentions the Manchester Salon http://www.manchestersalon.org.uk/ which has initiated a place for critical debate. And peer review – which Smooth Space has written into our vision statement – as ctirical feedback on work is a good thing to put into a funding bid.
Lucy is also keen to help us broaden our network – she asks us to think about who are our regional markers and to make sure we contact/connect with them. She tells us a list of people/organisations that are working in a similar way plus small activities we can get off the ground to get us started.
And we should put in markers and a time plan to keep ourselves on track and make sure we achieve steps towards writing our next funding bid. Plus, break down our costs into very small amounts – pots of money that will achieve a single part of our whole proposed activity. That way we can work out what we need to ask from funders and how a small amount will achieve a tangible goal.
Lucy also advises us to contact Visual Arts South West for funding advice and to mention kickstarters….
It has been a long and helpful session – our planning has shifted into focus and we feel like we can finally see what we are doing and hearing echoes of Paula Orrell’s advice to us to ‘be the conduit for enabling more stuff to happen in Torbay’
following Lucy’s visit – we make a phone call to ACE G4A who tell us there are no relationship managers any more – only national portfolio organisations, in effect, now have direct contact with ACE???
