sba arts trail – call for artists

Are you an artist/photographer/maker? Do you produce stuff and wish that you could show it off or even better, sell it to people? Do you live in South Bristol, or know someone who does? Do you want to be part of a great weekend of arts events and activities?

Well the next event that SBA is organising is the 2008 Arts Trail on 10 and 11 May 2008. The forms needed to join in can be found on the Arts Trail page of the SBA web site or the Downloads and documents page (under Taking part on the menus). Don’t delay – register now for this event, as the deadline is soon! (21 February 2008).

To take part all you need is a venue in South Bristol. If you don’t live in South Bristol some of the larger venues may still have space, the sooner you join the better as they fill up quite quickly. Joining the SBA is easy and costs £15, that money gets you an entry in the brochure as well as space on the SBA website (http://sbaweb.co.uk) which includes a blog area and an entry in the listing for the Arts Trail 2008.

Many people who have started from arts trails have gone on to bigger things. Several people I know who have taken part in past trails now have studios of their own and sell into recognised galleries.

So join now and be part of this exciting community event. We are looking of volunteers to help organise the Arts Trail too. If you have skills you think might be useful and want to help out, email communication@sbaweb.co.uk.

standing for chair of the sba

At the last SBA steering meeting quite a lot of people announced that they would step down, at least for the next year, from the SBA steering group. This leaves a vacuum that feels quite ominous, and there were suggestions that unless key positions were filled at the AGM, maybe the trail next year should or could not go ahead. At that meeting I proposed that I stand for vice-chair, and suggestions were made that it was not ambitious enough. I have therefore thought long and hard about this and have decided that I would like to run for chair of the SBA at the AGM. My credentials? Well, apart from running the SBA website team for the last two (wow, nearly three) years and attending every steering group meeting in that time, I have been involved in managing large to medium scale projects for about fifteen years at UWE. This has, of course, been in the IT field, but my background is as a graphic designer, where I was involved in several large projects. As an artist I have also been keen to evolve my own work, which has resulted in some medium term projects. So I’ve got a lot of experience of how to get from point A to point B and what it takes resource wise to get there.

So, some of my thoughts as we look forward are as follows: It is possible to hold an Arts Trail in May 2008. We have the skills and experience to do so, if we concentrate on the essentials. The essential part is the Art Trail itself, and all of the major elements are well known and describable (is that a word?) on a timeline. This then allows us to work backwards with a set of goals and targets that we will need to meet to achieve our aim of delivering a trail in May 2008. The key milestones are well understood, and most could be achieved without regular meetings if there was a reliable reporting mechanism from the people doing the work to the steering committee. Although this is possible, I do think we need the monthly meetings to keep continuity.

So to pick up on some of the themes discussed at the last meeting, and some that have surfaced since, my proposed goals for the SBA for the next year to 18 months would be:

• Hold an Arts Trail in May 2008 (100% do-able)
• Expand links with other organisations in the South Bristol Area e.g.
  • St. John’s Churchyard (via scda)
  • Former Ashton Court Festival organisation (they are interested in organising some performance events)
• Investigate expansion into other areas of South Bristol or become a charity or similar to evolve the organisation. Dave Morgan-Davies has volunteered to act as “consultant” to look into the viability of this. Sarah Gibby has expressed an intent to stand as vice chair, and is keen to explore the viability of morphing the SBA into a charitable organisation (at present it is a voluntary non-profit organisation).
  • As a sub project, possibly drop the “bank” from Southbank to become South Bristol Arts.

I am keen to move the SBA towards a greater role in South Bristol, particularly with the expansion of new housing in the area to the south of where we now operate. I think it is a great opportunity to reach out and bring the arts to an area that previously would not have access to it. With our newly identified brands (Arts Trail and SBA) we should be able to make a distinction between the roles that each can play in this expansion. As part of the drive to make things more professional, I am proposing that we take a more project driven approach to the Arts Trail, and whilst I don’t want to frighten people off, I do think there is scope for improvement in our ability to deliver. Last year there was a lot of duplication of effort, and I think if we can reduce this even just a bit, we will make the experience a lot nicer for our organising members. It is important that we do not lose the “fun” element of organising the trail!

I think that with many people stepping down, and with new people stepping up this year, we need to keep it simple and concentrate on our core strengths, otherwise we might get bogged down trying to re-create the existing structures. We already know what we want to achieve, have done it before, and I believe that we have the skills to do it again next year. Here’s to a successful Arts Trail in May 2008!

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why are arts trails so popular?

I ask this because, yes, I am involved in an arts trail, the Southbank Bristol Arts Trail. This year, despite the rain, we managed to get nearly as many people as last year to wander around the neighbourhoods of Southville, Bedminster and Ashton, popping into people’s houses and looking at the wonderful art on show. Now, we arent the only arts trail in Bristol. Oh no. We now have many on throughout the year, in North Bristol, Totterdown, Easton, St. Werburghs, Clifton and soon to be Windmill Hill. I apologise if I have left any trails out. It seems to be an expanding market, with the public hungry to go to these things. Why is this?

The first thing that obviously comes to mind is the fact people like to be nosey. They like to come and look inside people’s houses. So some of the people that turn up are your neighbours. They want to see what your house is like on the inside. How you live. To talk to you. To introduce themselves. When I was showing in a friend’s house a few years ago, we had lots of people from her street popping in and chatting. She had lived there for nearly ten years but had seldom if ever chatted to the people who lived more than a few doors away. It was a perfect excuse for them to come in, chat and break the ice.

The second reason like to come to arts trails is because they are fun. There is lots to see and do and sometimes buy. Weekends can be boring, but if there is an art’s trail on somewhere, well its easy to get to, plenty of parking (the street!) and if you get bored you can just stop and do something else. Or wander off. Or stop and come back later or next day. Its really non-commital. You havent made an big commitment to driving somewhere and paying for parking and then feel that you’ve got to see it all. It’s not formal, its relaxed.

This informality I think is the unique thing about arts trails. You arent tied into something, and the atmosphere is completely different than going to a gallery. Galleries tend to have this atmosphere, you know, whilst its calm and quiet and everything which is sometimes neat, its also not real. It’s got lots of philosphical baggage that some people dont like. I’m not talking about artists here, I’m talking about ordinary people who want to see art but get intimidated by galleries. Artists love galleries. Nothing wrong with them. But arts trails allow people to see art in a real environment. At home. People are friendly, you can meet the artist. Have a chat, a sit down on a sofa. Ask them stuff. You can sometimes do all that in a gallery but not very often. At a viewing you will only get a rare few minutes with an artist.

The next attraction of arts trails is the fact that you will get to see paintings. And drawings, in fact these days you get everything but you do get at least some art that is approachable by the public. I’m not a stuckist but it is nice to see paintings of things. And the public feel that art on trails is approachable. It is then the job of the artist to inform and educate people into other forms of art.

So art trails give people a nice informal community building excuse to get out on a Saturday or Sunday and see art. Its not surprising that they are popular, Whats more surprising is that there isnt one on every weekend!

technorati tags:arts, trails, southbank, bristol

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arts trail a success

Southbank Bristol Arts

Well its been over a week since it ended, but this year’s Southbank Bristol Arts Trail was a success. It was a fantastic week that started with the Arts Trail weekend, then followed on with the performance week. Despite the rain, the numbers were only slightly down on last year, with 4000 people coming through the doors of the Southville Cnetre. The performance events that followed were well supported. That was good, although I missed a couple of the events. The main thing was that there was something on to do or see every night, and whilst they weren’t football stadium style events they were good value entertainment. The arts trail goes from strength to strength and gets better each year. and is now the largest arts trail in Bristol.

Here are some pictures from this year’s event.

It proves what you can achieve in a community with a bit of work.

technorati tags:sba, bristol, arts trail, 2007

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arts trail coming up 12-13th may

One of the things I am involved in every year is the Southbank Bristol Arts Trail. It’s a great event, where artists, and there are over 200 of them packed into this small area in South Bristol, open their homes to the general public over an entire weekend. Last year in the Southville Centre, which is the main venue, we had over 4000 people through the door over the weekend. People come down to have a look around, look at art, nose at peoples houses, and generally have a great day out. Some people spread it out over the entire weekend. There is a great community feel to the event, and its good to see families and groups of people on foot wandering around the area smiling and happy. This year it’s even bigger than before, and we are going to have 64 venues with 200 artists. Most of the art is for sale, with reasonable prices. And its going on for a whole week, with performance during the following week.

My role in the arts trail (apart from participating as an artist) is to run the website group, and as a member of the steering committee I attend steering group meetings during the cold, wet and dark winters evenings. We basically organise the whole event, on practically no money, and we’re all volunteers. There. That’s got the whingeing out of the way. That said, we do get a lot out of it, not just the satisfaction of seeing all the happy smiling faces on the trail, or seeing ourselves on TV or in the press. For me, it’s something I do for the community, for the area. Its good for the local economy, for instance local the estate agents do well on the back of this as everyone wants to move to Southville these days, and that is reflected in the house prices! It’s also good for local traders, and people selling food and drink do exceptionally well throughout the trail. I also do it for the experience, as running the website gives me grass roots feel for how a good content managed system backed community website operates. Its a good testing ground for new ideas, what works and what doesnt. And most of all, how the people using it feel and react to changes. People dont like change, especially artists! But they are a good bunch.

The Arts Trail is on this year 12-13th May 2007, with the performance week covering the entire 12th-19th period. Why not come down and have a wander round? Its free!

Photos by Laurence Ketteringham

interactive art piece (part 2)

I mentioned on Wednesday that I was planning to get build a piece of interactive art for next year’s Southbank Bristol Arts Trail. I think I ought to flesh out a bit of what I had in mind, even though it’s not yet fully set in stone and I’m not altogether sure what exact form that might take. OK.

Last year (earlier this year actually) I did something with a group of local Flickr photographers. They went around the Arts Trail taking pictures with digital camera’s and then uploaded it to a Flickr Group dedicated to the Arts Trail. My plan was to then show these pictures on two main screens, one located in the Southville Centre,

and the other located in the Tobacco Factory.

The pictures would loop through, using a flash based slideshow viewer, the entire set on the Flickr group. The same show would be available for anybody to see from the SBA website. The final part of the plan was to the public to upload pictures from digital cameras or phones to a sister Flickr site that would be moderated and also fed into the slideshow. It would act as a continually updated documentary on the weekend’s events.

The reason it didnt get as far as they display screens bit was down to pure bad planning on the logistics side. That is to say it was my fault. A laptop failed a week or so before the event, and a replacement couldn’t be found. The screens were OK, the WiFi connections were there, it was just the KEY bit of the display hardware was missing. So that bit, the best bit, didnt happen.

Well next year I want to try again. Maybe the photographers will be interested in taking part, maybe we will have to think of a different method of accepting pictures, perhaps via a link to a Gmail account. I want to get it publicised earlier this time, so the public has more chance of finding out about it and taking part. But this time I want to make it even more interactive, with some mechanism for people in one of the bigger gallery spaces on the trail to be able to browse the pictures, or use the images to create further images or pieces of art. I see Squeak as a possible mechanism for allowing this to happen, although there are many ways of doing this. Open Croquet is such a method, although Second Life may be another means of acheiving the same thing.

Technorati tags: bristol, arts trail, sba, squeak, flickr, photography, interactive, art

writing an artist’s biography

Because I’ve had a piece of work accepted at the Grant Bradley Gallery, I’ve got to write a 150 word artists biography (surely that should be autobiography?) from the 3rd person perspective. Sounds easy, after all I’ve spouted thousands of words on this site over the last year alone. You would have thought so wouldn’t you. No. Writing about yourself to explain your art to others is difficult, but pretending that you are someone ELSE writing this about you is really difficult. It sounds, feels, really fake. But at the same time I understand that it is a really valuable exercise. Like writing an essay or sitting an exam, you know that somehow it’s good for you but you can’t quite work out how right at the precise time. It’s only later that you might get it.

So what do I say? What do you say about yourself? A bit of history, a bit of where-you’re-coming-from? What are your inspirations? Why you have produced this particular image. And why it is produced using the media that it is produced in? Still sound easy? It might be, if only it wasn’t for that 3rd person thingy making it all sound so – difficult. It must be a particularly English thing, not wanting to beat one’s own drum or something. I am pretty sure that Californians don’t get this kind of problem for example.

Tags: art, artist, biography, writing, Bristol

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its hot outside…

And I’m indoors pondering what needs to be done on the SBA website over the next year. We had a great Arts Trail weekend, with over 4000 people coming through the Southville Centre doors. Plenty of people brave enough to weather the rain and wind. The SBA website held up well, and although there were areas that I felt were weaker than others, overall it worked. Now is the time to look at what was acheived and to make a decision on what we are going to do to improve the site over the next year or so.

The first questions is – are we going to carry on using the Drupal CMS for the main content engine, or are we going to use a different one, or develop our own from scratch? And if we do develop, are we going to keep on with a hosted website or are we going to make the jump to a hosted server/virtual server? There are many pro’s and con’s for each of these decisions.

Keeping with what we have now

If we keep what we have now, there is a good chance we will have a working website at the end of the process. That means that in one year we will have a working site, even if we still have the limitations that we presently have. Those are – bandwidth and the limitations of the Drupal CMS. The plus side is that will all the experience I have gained using Drupal over the last year, we could develop further and then write some modules that overcome the problems that we are having. And buying more bandwidth is not really a problem.

The other side to it is that we find it difficult to develop new solutions, e.g. voting for non-members has been a problem for me. If we had a completely hand-built soluton we could have overcome this by, well, building it.

Developing on a new platform

If we decide to build on a new platform or framework, we would get around the limitations issue. If we needed something, we could build it in. My reservation is that we might not have enough time to develop all the stuff we want in the 6-8 months we have available. I am looking specifically at Django, which I feel would give us the maximum flexibility whilst at the same time giving us enough hand-holding that we could get it up and running without too much trouble. The other framework I looked at was Seaside, but that is developed using Smalltalk and I dont feel confident enough in my Smalltalk skills to be able to say that I can develop a solution using it. That will have to wait for a later project.

If we used something like Django we would be able to make pretty much any functionality we might need, but might find that the task of actually coding might be too time intensive. We would also have to look at a hosted server solution, as we would need root access to the server to make it work. I am sure that it would be OK from a financial point of view, but it would only work from a technical point of view if I could split the work between myself and one or two other people.

What we learned

So did we learn anything from this year’s Arts Trail that could help us make a decision? Well, I learned one valuable lesson, and that it is important for you to make anything you develop as simple as you possibly can. Simple for yourself and your users. It doesnt matter how simple it is, the golden rule is..it could have been simpler! It really doesnt matter how much instruction you provide, it will never be enough or written in the right way for all of your users. And speed is of the essence. You will be asked to provide functionality then and there. Immediately available tonight. And simple. And “oh can it link back into the voting thingy?” Keep it simple at keep it really easy and fast to add stuff.

The other thing is that you may have all the best features in the world, but you might not be able to get the people to use it. Just because it is there doesn’t mean that they will come and use it. They wont. They really wont just come and use it. Why? Maybe they are scared, maybe they dont want to come and interact with your site. After all, what’s in it for them? They wont do anything unless there is either something in it for them or else there is something that will not be done for them unless they do interact. Like uploading their image for the trail. If you dont upload it by this or that date, then it wont be in the brochure or the map. Suddenly you have everyone trying to upload there image at the last minute of the deadline!

Bandwidth. This is a pain. You pay for every time you go over your bandwidth limit – that is, how much pictures and text you are allowed to have moving across the internet from or to your website. if you exceed your limit, you are simply cut off. Your website simply stops being there for your users. For us that happened twice, fortunately not on the Arts Trail weekend, but it did happen between the uploading of images and the weekend itself. This could be mitigated by several things. We over specified what size image we needed, on advice from the graphics team. We actually asked for images that were too big, consequently we went over bandwidth later that month. The images were printed at 2cmx2cm, in fact I think they were even smaller in print than that! The images we asked for were simply huge. We didnt need images of that size at all.

The other thing I learned is that you might think that our members would be the biggest users of bandwidth. No, they’re not. The biggest users of bandwidth are Google and MSN Search, the two biggest search engines. Between them I estimate that they took over half of the bandwidth in the early part of the problem month. This can be stopped by use of a special file called robots.txt which tells the search engines what parts of your website they can and cannot go in and therefore consume bandwidth.

Help desk, communications, getting information. Three bottlenecks for this year’s site. Without Janine Partington’s hard work it could have all gone horribly wrong. What we need is an easy way for our members and people to get access to information and log problems with us. Everything went via Janine and then onto myself. Whilst we were fairly pain free (thanks Janine) if we had got a major problem then would have been deluged. There needs to be a clearer communications channel between the website group and the members/users. Janine needs some king of way to be able to get at the database on the server, as that is now the most up-to-date version of the members list. She needs to be able to access it, add people, delete people and run mail merge’s etc against the list.

Content. There wasnt enough content being added to the site. Most posts were down to Janine, Dave Morgan-Davies and myself. This isnt enough, and if the site is to grow into a true community asset then we are going to need a way to drive content onto the site. That means we are going to need an editorial team/group to write articles, stories and come up with ideas for special items e.g. competitions, voting etc. And it needs to be easy enough so that the person adding this stuff doesnt need to know a thing about website design or programming ar anything like that.

Many lessons learned then, does it help us make a decision? Not really, but it is a starting point for discussion. If anything the motto has to be “keep it simple”, and get people involved with the process. So if you live in South Bristol and you are interested in being part of this process, then get in touch with me. You will be made very welcome!

change of venue – southville centre

Well less than a week to the arts trail! May 20th and 21st will be busy days in South Bristol. At short notice I have had to switch to a new venue, the Southville Centre. I will not be at Gathorne Road. It is very short notice but I think it is for the best. The Southville Centre has lots of people coming through the doors so its not like I am not going to get people looking at my pictures. I wont have as much space as I would have had at Gathorne Road, but at least I will be able to get around some of the other venues at get a look at other peoples work. Plus there are people on hand to sell stuff for you whilst you are not there. It has worked out rather well.

southbank bristol arts trail 2006

Well, its less than one week to go until the Southbank Bristol Arts Trail 2006 and am I ready? Nope. Its been a hectic few months trying to get everything ready on the website, and my own stuff has taken a bit of a backburner. My venue is at 62 Gathorne Road, but my kind friend Gillian, who lets me use her house, has been ill and it wasn’t certain that I would be able to use it as a venue. She has now said that that she would be most offended if I didnt use her house, so again, thanks Gillian!

I am showing mostly photographs this year, as I have been taking rather a lot in the last 6 months or so, and have had little time for drawing which is a shame. I will do more iluustration stuff for next year’s art trail to make up for it. I am hoping to have at least 10 largish photo’s on display and then a selection of smaller prints. No bags this year for sale!