DIY Educate launch!

The weeks are moving at such a fast pace and so much is squeezed in that my blog is becoming long essays into my life. However , This is a good news blog!

Core gallery got some funding from Fenton Arts Trust with lots of thanks to the glorious Annabel Tilley for helping get that . I was so excited at this prospect of actually being able to pay artists for DIY Educate I nearly blacked out when I got the letter.

It also means we can offer more on our DIY Educate programme. In addition we are also now able to offer students and recent graduates a half price discount on our membership. This means we can give more accessibility and for recent graduates the first year after graduation is when they are most vulnerable.

DIY actually launched over the weekend. It was a fab start

Some feedback from one participant....

Just to say thank you so much for putting on engine chat chat on Saturday. It was great to meet everyone and to get some feedback on my work, I found it really useful and motivating as well as very stimulating, and really enjoyed the artists talk afterwards in the gallery also.... brilliant brilliant brilliant!

Our first nuts and bolts was packed to the rafters, 34 people (four travelled from Maidstone ). It was a fantastic talk , everyone who came seemed so attentive and interested. Nick Kaplony and Jack Hutchinson joined me and they were amazing, it was a really relaxed and friendly environment full of anecdotes. One of the most important parts was a discussion about rejection. I recounted a residency I applied for that I was not eligible for ( it was in very very very small print ) . I spent a long time working on the form, deciding what I was going to do with my practice. When I got the email to say I wasn’t eligible, I didn’t get cross, I thought, it does not matter, I will do everything I set out in my project. I will move my practice on and I have. I fulfilled my own residency. So failure and rejection can be turned around.

After the talk I spoke to people that came, they seemed so relived about being told the truth. Some told me that they had never been told this at art school – art school was just about making, however now that they had graduated they felt so lost because even if they had made fantastic work they were drowning in the complexities of real life in the art world. It made them feel inadequate and failures, which I very much doubt they were. This is a disservice for Art Schools to do that, they have to start addressing professional practice. It is very unfair, particularly if so many higher education institutes are putting up fees because they ‘ offer so much value’

Skin Job: Another fantastic exhibition curated by Andrew Bryant at Core Gallery

Artists: James Prevett, Niklas Tafra, Chad Burt, Daniel Lichtman, Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh, Adrianna Palazzolo and Miguel Pacheco

The PV was jam packed – the South London Last Friday Art Map launched, that partnered perhaps in our mini break over xmas meant lots of excitement in the air.

The curator/ artist talk on Saturday was informative and fascinating and allowed us tp spend more time interpreting the artwork. It is a rare pleasure to be told by an artist their processes. My role in this is to ask serious non art questions, such as ‘ so what did the Ukulele repairman think when you brought in a Ukulele you had smashed to pieces in a field in Holland…’ y’see accessible…..

www.coregallery.co.uk