Artistically Challenged

http://instagram.com/actheseries
http://actheseries.com/

Just keeping these links here for myself, somebody made a comedy series for instagram based on the New York art scene <3

http://www.imaginaryfriendstheatre.com/p/no-hopers.html

Also this film sounds cool. I'm enjoying work based on the post-university slump at the moment but I'm not sure if it's because I'm trying to morbidly peer into the future or because I have watched a lot of people leave education fresh and ready to take on the world, and show up a few months later depressed and poor and it's good to see that disparity recognised.

Here's a picture of some of the Jamaica-based batik wall hangings from Kemball School in Blurton, Stoke-On-Trent where I have been helping out the Cultural Sisters this week. Even though my semester is over at university, I still really enjoy helping out there every week and it's great to have direction and a sense of purpose.

A Brief Spell invigilating the Bang! exhibition in Spode

Here's a picture of the camp we set up upstairs at Spode while invigilating the Bang! Art exhibition. Bang! was intended to showcase artwork by people who either lived in or studied at Stoke-On-Trent. Most of the work was paper-based 2D artwork, with photography and painting although there were some exceptions. 

The work was creatively exhibited in the ever-decaying Spode Factory Site, often using the large space available well. As a notoriously decaying city, the location is perhaps meant to inspire a sense of innovation and restoration through creativity.

Publicizing needs improvement, as a lot of people I have spoken to have no idea that there is an exhibition on at all. Posters throughout the city or a wider distribution of the Zines created would have at least encouraged some curiosity as contacting local media such as radio stations and newspapers. I can't even say exactly how long it will be on for or what days, but last I heard, there were plans in the making of opening the exhibition at weekends when people would be available to invigilate it.

However, I think that the project is a positive, inventive and ambitious outreach and an impressive feat to organise something of this size unaided by any larger sponsoring bodies as of yet. Funding for Bang! is crowd-sourced on the internet through Sponsume, which will hopefully continue to have a bright future in the post-industrialised towns throughout England.

European Social Fund Community Grants

Recently as part of my work placement, I attended a brief workshop about applying for grants from the European Union for community projects and I think the information ought to be more readily available, so I'm going to post slides from the presentation and a couple of notes I made, and hide the rest of the post behind a page break in case you are super not interested because even though it's useful knowledge to have as an artist, it's not particularly exciting or even attractively designed.