The Story of an Exhibition - Part 1 - The Application Process

The first part of any exhibition is applying to actually have the exhibition. In April of this year I received an email from Arts Development at Stockton Borough Council about empty shop space available in Stockton Town Centre, a project called “Meanwhile….. in Stockton.”



At first I thought, hmm I’m not sure I can do this, a whole exhibition by myself? I haven’t been doing that much of my own work lately. Then I thought of two other local artists, who had met recently, and decided that this would be the perfect opportunity for us to work together again.

Next was the meeting to discuss what exactly we would do with the space if we got it. I love these kind of meetings, they’re always a bit crazy, lots of ideas flying around, trying to get 3 creative people to mesh their ideas together is a mission. Eventually we came up with a week of an exhibition/shop, including some of each of our work, curated by me into some semblance of order. Following the exhibition we planned on a week of workshops, using each of our skills to give the people of Stockton a taster of lots of different things. Of course it was even more of a mission pinning down a two week period between then and October, when all 3 busy people could be free, but eventually we figured it out.

So I filled in the form and off it went to the council for a decision. Filling in the form is more complicated than it seems, you need to make what you want to do sound exciting, different, new, unique if possible, to increase your chances of being accepted. It’s a little like writing a personal statement. It took me a lot of thinking, drafting and re-drafting before I was happy with the result.

A couple of weeks later the verdict was in, we had the space and a small grant to pay for materials and publicity, for both the exhibition and the workshops. Yipee!

Stay tuned for the next part in story of an exhibition, coming soon!