Presentation Ideas

(Click to Enlarge)

Rough plan of our presentation.

Funding Research....

This afternoon, Elena and I decided to research Funding as it is the last big thing that we have left on our 'To do' list.

Elena decided to research into The Arts Council and I decided to research The Heritage Lottery Fund.
Here is what I found:

 I feel that our idea actually matches quite a few of these points such as:

• Peoples memories and experiences: Our whole art piece is designed to incorporate people and their experiences in Museums. Also, we will be encouraging members of the public to remember their first experiences and tap into their memories of the first time that they walked through a door into a Museum/Gallery. 
• Histories of people and the communities: By bringing in the community to take part in this Public Art piece, we are offering the opportunity for the public to share and show their experiences. I feel that our piece is a very communal piece that should include every single Museum visitor. 
• Languages and Dialects: Although Art is a very universal thing, I understand that it's not everybody's cup of tea. In my mind, I would like to be able to offer the opportunity for people to articulate through words as well as art what their experiences have been in Museums and Art Galleries. Also, not everybody shares the same language, thoughts, words etc. I feel that by opening up the way in which people can respond to this art piece, it will appeal to every visitor no matter where they come from, what their experience is, how they communicate etc.
• Historic buildings and streets: People may draw the Museums and Galleries that they have visited?
• Collections of objects, books or documents in museums, libraries or archives: Not every person is going to have visited the same Museum and also, no two Museums are the same. Not everyone is going to have been the Science Museum as not everybody is going to have visited the Smithsonian or the Louvre. Hopefully we will get a range of drawings, words, experiences etc which will make our piece varied and successful.

I then went on to research which programme we, as a group, would be eligible for. Here is what I found:

There are two programmes that we would be eligible to apply for:

1. Your Heritage (£3,000 - £50,000)
2. Young Roots (£3,000 - £25,000)

After reading about both the Arts Council and the Heritage Lottery Fund, I think (after looking at the various bullet points that we would have to match), the Heritage Lottery Fund would be our more successful application if we were to apply. 

Arts Council Funding Research

We decided to research two funding companies, The Heritage Lottery Fund and The Arts Council. We split the research two ways, and it was my job to research The Arts Council.

I managed to download a PDF explaining the process of submitting an application for a grant which was very helpful as it reduced the process down to 5 steps.

1) Read the PDF booklet as guidance on how to answer the questions.

2) Write a proposal detailing the activity that needs to be funded. We can use the proposal and rationale that we have already as a starting point and edit it to address it for funding.

3) Fill in the Application Form which tells The Arts Council how much funding we are asking for and information about ourselves. It also collects background and racial information so that The Arts Council can monitor the background information of people who receive grants.

4) Include any relevant extra information for example, in our case, we may like to add that this piece will be touring.

5) Send off the application either by post or online.

I downloaded the actual application form as well, and found it to be quite complex. There were 11 pages of questions about ourselves and our artwork. I feel that it would be very interesting to complete the form to the best of our ability in order to better understand our idea. I think the process of filling in the form and discussing each of the questions would bring up things that we might not have even thought of due to this being a hypothetical piece.

Some Photographs of a Research Session

Evaluation of our Project so far....

I feel very confident in our 'Make Your Mark: Your Museum' project so far. For me, I feel that our idea encompasses everything that I wanted to explore in this project and I feel that we have achieved a great deal in the time that we have had so far. At the beginning of this project, I was extremely naive about what being a curator would entail, as well as how much work and how many people are involved in Art as a business. So this project has been quite a learning curve such as learning about Artist Statements, Proposals, Letters to Contractors and all the work behind Funding. 

I haven't been updating this blog as regularly as I would have liked to recently due to issues at home that have taken a toll on both my personal and college life. My group are aware of this. However, over the Christmas period I hope to gather my thoughts, ideas and notes/sketches in order to be able to contribute more regularly. 

Following this post, I hope to update some previous posts and then add some more of my findings from research I have done over the past couple of weeks.

To start: here is an image of a quick sketch that I produced of our proposed art piece. I drew it over the top of a map that I took from the Museum itself so that we would be able to visualise the piece in the space that we have chosen to put it.

Letter to Contractor

Dear Sir or Madam,

We are writing to request your services in installing a piece of artwork in the Plymouth Museum and Art Gallery. We are a collaborative group of artists and have been working on a public art piece which will be touring some of the major museums in the UK.

We estimate that the installation of this piece will take 24 hours and the museum has allowed us 24 hours after museum hours to complete the installation, on the 25th November 2011 (5pm to midnight) and the 26th (7am to midnight.) Staff from the museum will be on hand during these times.

The piece itself will consist of 5 separate acrylic tubes (4 measuring 2m with a diametre of 25cm) and 1 measuring 4m with a diametre of 50cm) and a concrete weighted base.

Blueprints are enclosed.

We look forward to hearing your reply, please contact us at enquiries@makeyourmark.com,

Sincerely

Elena Brake

Jess Bent

Louiza Hamidi

Fay Hawkes.

Evaluation of our Project so far

At this point, just before reading week, I have decided to evaluate our project so far to determine what will have to be done over the Christmas holidays in order to be ready with a presentation.

Our idea is pretty much finalised. Although we all have different questions and we could take this piece in many different ways, it is important not to dwell so much on the idea that we forget the evidence (writing, sketches etc) that we need to include in our presentation

We have a lot of visual material, ie photographs and sketches along with some written pieces to go with our idea, and we have looked through the blog to find that we have done well at recording our thoughts and ideas, so to create the presentation we should be able to pick and choose from the posts we have already uploaded to the blog.

As there was no computer access last week, a lot of the evidence for last week's session still needs to be updated on the blog. This will be one of the tasks for today. Last week, we wrote a list of tasks we had already completed, and those that still needed to be done.

(Bold, tasks that need to be done.)

-Funding research

-Proposal and opening letter

-Letter to contractor

-Newspaper Ad

-Website Concept

-Group CV

-Critical Rational

-Maquette

-Drawings/diagrams

-Leaflet

-Videos

-Photoshopped image

-Puzzle Pieces

The letter to the contractor was completed in draft form last week. My next task will be to write this up onto the blog as a finalised version.

Proposal

Proposal

We are a group of artists proposing to exhibit a piece of public art in the Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery.

We want to create a large installation made up of acrylic tubes that will function as a funnel, for collecting information from the public. It will have different shoots that come from it, built at different heights so it is accessible for everyone.

We will have individual puzzle pieces (15x15cm) for members of the public to draw what museum means to them. These will then be posted into the funnel from the top, building enormous visual value to the piece, the minute you walk through the door.

Our interest is to find out what the public interpret the museum to be. Our piece is titled ‘Make Your Mark: Your Museum’. We are passionate about public and interactive art, and will be touring at different museums over the UK, hoping to create a snapshot of the public’s understanding of the museum in current times.

In the Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, we would like the piece to go directly in the centre of the foyer, with the funnels branching off leading to all 4 sides of the upper level. We know that this installation will encourage people to take part and in turn, explore upstairs in the museum. We will run scheduled workshops and will also work closely with local schools, encouraging children to take part.

Please see attached sheets for more detail and blueprint.

I have some bad news. I will not be at our session on Thursday as I have an interview. I am going to try to get this finished so that I am not leaving you to do it, and you will only have the funding to do. I just need some direction.... Is this on the right tracks? Too detailed? Not detailed enough? Please could I have some pointers...

Artist statements

Today we have created a page of personal artist statements, to support our proposal. We have included personal email address and artist websites, so that the museum can explore our individual work, should they choose.

References

Louiza: Public Art, People, Projects, Process, ADAMS, Eileen (1997)
I found this book in the LRC. It gave me a clear idea of what public art entails and it's purpose. I was able to take an extract from it, which described a brief definition of public art. I then interpreted this into our own piece. I also found a lot infomation regarding funding, which has helped me to further explore this area. (01/12/2011)

Jess: 'The Benefit of Public Art' by Sara Selwood (1995)
I also found this book in the Public Art section of the LRC and I have found it very helpful. There are numerous quotes in this book that I can use to relate to our piece of art but I also think that it has made me aware of the public opinion. It's all very well thinking that everyone will understand our chosen idea but that is not neccessarily the case. (01/12/2011)


Elena: Exhibitions: Universal Marketing Tools, Alfred Alles (1973)Although this book isn't technically on artistic exhibitions, I found that some of the points it made could be applied to our exhibition. (01/12/2011)

Fay: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/museum
I have used this reference in the critical rationale to enforce our point of how the definition of museums are changing. (01/12/2011)

Newspaper Advert

I wrote this article and made it look like a real newspaper clipping using a website called www.fodey.com.

The article sums up our idea in a way that would invite people into the museum to participate. It also gives details of "Drop-in workshops", an idea we came up with last week to give more guidance to people who want to contribute. Originally, I had come with idea to run workshops on different days focused on different people, but we decided that this would be too structured and would turn into more of a project than a contemporary art piece.

Hypothetical Website Design

What is Public Art?

This morning we are researching what public art actually is. We wanted to find some books and artists who have created similar exhibitions.

I have found that public art is described as 'sculpture in the open air' and 'art in public places'. It's purpose is to be freely accesible by all members of the public. It can be permanent or temporary and hopefully will be interactive and stimulating.

"It has been claimed that public art is a cultural investment, vital to the economic recovery of many cities, attracting companies, adding to land values, creating employment. It is said to contribute to local distinctiveness and create a sense of place or regional identity."

Public Art People, Projects, Projects, ADAMS, Eileen, 1997, Page 7

I think our Make Your Mark: Your Museum piece, resembles a great example of how public art can be used to contribute to local distictiveness, by gathering people's ideas of what museum means to them. Our piece will be challenging peoples pre-conceptions of 'museum' by showing what the public and overall picture of the puzzling question of 'what does museum mean to you?'

I think it is important to understand that everyone may interpret a piece of art differently. Jess has just found an extract from a book, describing that public art can become problematic if many other people do not understand the meaning of our exhibit. I think it will be important to provide very concrete ideas of what this project is about and what it's purpose is. People will interpret 'museum' differently, making great use of diversity, but it will work well if everyone has a clear idea of what is intended by this piece. We would educate the public with this via a Make Your Mark website (hopefully there is as computer in the museum accessible to the public) that would include all the information that we share with the museum. We want this project to be completely transparent as if something includes members of the public, they are entitiled to have access to all the information regarding it. It would be good to have a video of us (the artists) talking about the project, on the website. From my experience, I find it very enjoyable watching video clips of the artists talking about their work.

after the group spoke with adam and james there were some fears that people would put anything down the chutes and ruin the piece, so after looking at different money collection boxes and ballet boxes, all seem to have one similar feature, a money slot! so we are thinking about harnessing this idea on the chutes so that it is only big enough to fit a puzzle piece measuring 15cm square, so no one can chuck, rubbish, food, etc. down the chutes

1st December, Research

To give our project more depth, we decided to look through library books about exhibition and public art. We found a lot of interesting quotes which spurred ideas. I was reading a book on the exhibition of products for companies, although mostly unrelated to our project I felt that some of the things in the book could be applied to our own exhibition.

"Distributing Literature", this is a section from the book: Exhibitions: Universal Marketing Tools. We decided last week that we would like our leaflets to be succinct and straight to the point, without offering much information on what exactly the piece was, as this information would be given to the public through open workshops. We felt that on top of this we should design a hypothetical website that people could be directed onto in order to learn more about the piece.

Here i have found how these interactive charity box gets the public more involved and more drawn to use the item, i think we need to make ensure that our structure is appealing and has an incentive to do it. The first simply adds more excitement to the venture but the second you really feel like you want to do it as if you succeed you win a free taco.

Recapping

because of my bout of tonsilitus i was unable to attend last weeks discussions, but this morning everyone has recapped me about the mind map made, james' discussion and how the overall idea has evolved, i happy with everything that has gone on and we are now working towards creating our proposal this afternoon. i will now be researching the ergonomics of ballet/collection boxes and how they are fitted together.