Exhibition - PREPARATION

Part of the module was to exhibit our work in a gallery as a group. Me, Kelly and Sarah clubbed together and rented an exhibition space at Islington Mill and planned to exhibit our work between the 15th of December and the 21st. This would be my second group exhibition, as well as my fifth exhibition in general, so I was super excited but also anxious as to what to expect.

We knew promotion was the key to getting our work out there, and we wanted our exhibition to have a fun and eye catching poster to draw people into reading the content. We commissioned a graphic designer to draw a cartoon portrait of all three of us alongside cameras to get our passion across. It was a great success as many people commented on how they had noticed it because of the edgy and different drawing included alongside the text! We printed around 40 A5 leaflets and a couple of A4 leaflets and spread the word around all the University campuses. We had a few taken down, especially in the photography department, which at first was disheartening as we thought the building was supposed to support the students in their extra curriculum activities, but we did not let it stop us.

Printing my own prints was something I had never had to do before, so I was quite anxious and nervous incase I did something wrong. Luckily, we all helped each other out on a mammoth 9 hour printing session (including two trips back to Bolton to retrieve hard drives, two cans of mango juice and a ink change). 

The prints turned out amazingly, and looked super professional. We then had to decide between printing and mounting on mount board, or printing and framing. Due to our combined low budget and venue rules, we decided it would be more beneficial and cost efficient to mount out images on mount board, and attach to the walls using tack and adhesive mounting strips.

Mounting was the scariest part of the process, again taking a mammoth but smaller 6 hours to mount and trim down, we headed down to the workshop to use the spray room so we could use the adhesive spray mount. We had to be super careful we did not get any glue or dust on the images because of the dirty work surfaces, but we managed just fine and did not damage any prints in the process. Overall, the preparation was time consuming and stressful, but it was amazing and rewarding seeing our photographic work in print and on walls.