Free Range Preparation
This is the first year that Burton College will be exhibiting at the Free Range art and design show. Free Range provides an excellent platform for students to showcase their work to the public and industry.
Students from Burton College on the Foundation Degree in Digital Media Production (Photography) will be showing work from the 17th to the 21st of June. As one of the students, I’ll be exhibiting thirty images from my recent A Vote for Ruth project.
As a group the first thing we did was to visit the location to see what the place was like and meet with Tamsin O’Hanlon who set up Free Range. After this a committee of students was made up to oversee the college’s contribution to Free Range. With the best of intentions there was much focus on fund raising, with students organising card sales and competitions which ultimately amounted to a small sum of money. Meetings initially were irregular, but began to take more discipline nearer the date.
In the end the college secured most of the funds we needed, with students contributing a nominated fee that was the same for everyone.
For my part, I was mostly absent from this activity as I was involved heavily in producing A Vote for Ruth. To my mind it was much more important to ensure we had work to exhibit, rather than worry about trying to raise funds through a cake bake or deciding what the name of the exhibition should be.
The exhibition does have a name, it’s called 'Catalogue.' I’m not really sure how we arrived at this name, but that’s what it is. All the students were presented with a selection of logos and were asked to vote for the one they liked the most. At a later stage though the most voted for logo (which was dull in my opinion), was usurped by a suggestion from a student to use an image of a cat on a log. And so the Cat-a-log logo is what the college is using. I make no further comment about this!
The week after finishing my assignment, all the students were asked to bring their work in to be selected by the tutors for the exhibition. This took the form of a fairly informal crit session, with students voting for their favourite images and tutors making the final decision. At this stage I’d narrowed my photos down to about sixty images, thirty of which were selected for the show, taking into consideration the wall space available, costs and the like.
Getting down to my final selection of images was a fairly arduous task. Mostly because I had to do this over a relatively short space of time. Normally, I’d prefer to leave them for a little while, forget about them and comeback later with fresh eyes and less of a sentimental view of them. To an extent I selected images as I went along, using Apple’s Aperture to rate each image and have them accordingly placed automatically into albums called “No,” “No but Keep,” “Maybe,” “Yes” and “Final Selection.” After I’d finished photographing I pretty much went through all the photos again, repeating this process.
We decided the best way to show my work would be to have them printed and displayed in 8” by 10” white frames with a small amount of text underneath to briefly say what was going on in each photo. Rather than pay the fee that everyone else was paying to the college for printing, framing, etc, I funded and sourced this myself, although it worked out roughly equal.
So now, with less than a week to go, everything is mounted, framed and packed up ready to go. I just need to sort a few things and get myself down to London.
