Hello everyone, and welcome to Photo Abstracts in 2014! The start of a whole new year! I have lots of plans for the coming 12 months, although still no over-arching "master plan". I guess it's early days yet, still. But for now, I have lots of ideas and projects to keep me busy! And so far, 2014 is looking promising!
Well, I think I can safely tell you now about one of the exciting things I was hinting at before the new year. I am going to be one of the exhibiting artists at Eccles Community Art Gallery from January 18th until February 8th! As I mentioned several posts ago, the lovely Karen, who is one of the ladies who runs the gallery, and I kept in touch after meeting at the Salford Arts Development evening, and she has booked me in as one of the artists for their first show of 2014! Yay!
The gallery is a not-for-profit run place, whose chief aim is to bring art to the local community and to give local artists a platform to exhibit their work. As such, I'm not predicting huge volumes of sales from this event (which is probably the way to approach any exhibition anyway, in my experience so far), but I do think it should be an excellent way for me to build a local audience for my work, so it's really exciting for me!
The gallery is open 10-4pm on Saturdays, and 10-3pm on Tuesdays, and I am planning to be there all day on the opening day, Saturday the 18th of January, and for at least a part of each of the other days that the gallery will be open whilst my work is exhibited there. (That's Jan 21st,25th,28th and Feb.1st, 4th and 8th). So, of course, if you are anywhere near Eccles on any of those dates, you MUST pop in and say hello!.
Other exciting things that may come from this; I popped into the gallery yesterday to talk to Karen and meet Elaine, the other lady who runs the gallery, and they were telling me that they have good links with the local online news outlet,Salford online, so it might be possible to get a profile, and maybe even an interview up on their web page to coincide with the exhibition! Exciting opportunities indeed! Of course, if and when these things appear I shall post links to them here, but for now, here is the gallery's webpage and Facebook page.
In other news…. another little job I had on my "to do" list for the start of the year, was enter a Postcard for the International Postcard Show 2014, which is an annual exhibition run by the Surface Gallery in Nottingham, which sounds really interesting. I was going to explain how it works, but then realised they had already done it far better than I could hope to on their website, so I shall simply quote them;
"Surface Gallery is delighted to present our first exhibition of 2014, the International Postcard Show. This exciting exhibition is a highly popular event at Surface Gallery, with all entries accepted and included in the show. It will feature hundreds of original creations in an array of different media by established artists, students and newcomers from all over the world. Hundreds of postcard-sized artworks will be on sale during the exhibition at £15 each, so this is a fantastic chance for budding art collectors to snap up an original work of art at an affordable price.
Once again all participating artists will have the opportunity to exchange their postcard with another artist selected at random at the end of the exhibition. The aim of this remote exchange is to foster new connections and encourage ongoing communication amongst artists from diverse backgrounds and different parts of the world."
So, even if my postcard doesn't sell, I'll get an artwork back from another artist - I suspect that this is what will actually happen anyway, and I'm fine with that, as it sounds pretty exciting!
Anyway, I have mentioned before how I always leave things to the last minute, and this was no exception. The deadline is this Friday, and of course entries have to be mailed, so I rushed to get my entry completed yesterday morning before dashing to the post office in the pouring rain to get it sent. I only started it yesterday as well, so it was done in a bit of a hurry, but I am quite pleased with the result nonetheless. This is something I've been sort of experimenting with for a while, and want to do more of; using my photos to create collages. Ok, so enough yapping, here's my finished postcard:
The show runs from January 15th to February 8th - pretty much exactly the same as my exhibition in Eccles. But, if I can find the time, I'd quite like to go and have a look at it, as it seems like a really fun idea, and I'm curious to see what the other artists managed to squeeze onto their relatively small canvas!
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