Three weeks have gone by since we achieved the amazing target we set for our Kickstarter campaign, raising £2500 towards the cost of putting on The New Immortals exhibition. Since then it has been a period of full-on planning – getting together with the artists who are making new installation work for the show, meeting with the team at Phoenix, drawing up plans for the gallery build, defining the size and proportions of individual artists’ spaces, talking to the technicians who will do the build, costing materials and drawing up the final plans. It’s been great to be able to finalise these plans at last, now that I know that there are sufficient funds to pay for all the materials we will need to construct the gallery lay-out that we want. So I’ve got a bumper shopping list of £1000 worth of timber, MDF sheets, paint and screws all ready to order next week!
It has also been a period of intense activity putting arrangements in place for the events programme which will accompany the exhibition. We’ve got a great range of events planned including a symposium in partnership with Brighton & Sussex Medical School, an artists’ talk and networking event with Blue Monkey Network and artist Anna Dumitriu, a book launch for Murray Ballard who is one of the artists taking part in the exhibition, and events in the gallery every Saturday throughout the show including a drawing workshop with artist Angela Smith and some really interesting guests dropping in to our informal Saturday Lab gallery events. The first two Saturdays, the 20th and 27th of February are going to be run in partnership with scientists from The Centre for Regenerative Medicine, part of the University of Brighton, as part of Brighton Science Festival, and I’ll be meeting with them next week to talk about the sort of things we’ll be doing in the gallery for those two Saturdays.
It was exciting today to get the first drafts for the exhibition flyers and posters which are looking great and will be going to print next week!.Details of the gallery events are already appearing on the Phoenix website too at http://www.phoenixbrighton.org/events/the-new-immortals/ so do have a look there for more details and put some dates in your diary for a visit if you can!
This week I’m hoping to put some finishing touches to my new video, In Praise of Renewal, working with film-maker Sam Sharples on Monday to complete the final edit. After that I’m looking forward to freeing up a bit of time to concentrate on developing the installation parts of the show. Time is going very quickly now! Watch this space for another update later in the month.