Client Pitch

Proposal

The Exhibition space that I will be using for my client pitch is at Positive Light Projects in Exeter. The date of the exhibition runs from May 13th 2024 to Friday 17th May 2024.

The client for this is Matt Burrows, Curator and Gallery Manager at Exeter Phoenix. His emails address for contact is matt.burrows@exeterphoenix.org.uk.

This is a suitable client pitch for my professional engagement portfolio because we have been organising the exhibition ourselves, and I don’t have any experience of curating a gallery space, so I can pitch my ideas of how I want to hang the artwork to him, and hopefully he can tell me the practicalities of whether it will work or not, and any tips for a better way of displaying it. Matt came in to college to specifically sit down with each of us to discuss what we will be doing, and I value his feedback because he has years of experience in the area.

I will be sending the client the following Images of the space, and a mood board of how I intend to hang the pieces of art, along with tools that will be needed to achieve this.

I needed to ask the client the following questions:

• Which size frame would be best to display illustrations in? A4? A3? A2?

• How many would you like to display? All of them? (7)

• What was the ceiling height? And would it work and not be too heavy for the ceiling?

• Would you be happy to be in the centre of the room?

• Do you want to use just the Hero pattern, or would you like to display some of the supporting patterns as well?

I would like from the client accepting my design for curating the gallery space, and any feedback on whether he thinks this is a good idea, and how this could be better achieved.

I will then keep in contact with the client after the pitch by regularly checking in and giving updates up the status of the project, and send any relevant photographs for him.

The client contact will benefit my project because I will be able to adjust any amendments before getting too far ahead, making sure he is happy with the project at the end. Face to face show and tell makes it a lot easier to discuss the project.

The feedback that I received from Matt was that he likes the idea of making the fabric a statement piece, and agreed that we should focus on the one project, instead of trying to display two. He suggested that we don’t want the fabric hanging flat, we want movement in it to display how it would be used, in curtains for example. When it came to the frames, he informed me that 3, 5, 7, or 9 always looks better when in a gallery.

He also suggested that instead of hanging the fabric with bulldog clips we could use a pole to drape the fabric over, suspended from the ceiling. We discussed whether we could use a wooden pole, or a copper pipe, which would look very cool, but it might also have the problem of the fabric slipping off the pipe, and then we would need to thread elastic through the pipe to hold it on. In this scenario I would have to order 6 metres of fabric rather than 3 metres, so that it could reach the floor on both sides of the pole.

I decided not to follow the pole/pipe suggestion as it would make the hanging much more complicated and expensive, where the fabric is the focal piece, it is a textile and not ‘artwork’ so I don’t think the display is as important to the design.

If I had to do this project again, I would make it much more diverse. I would have used all of the individual animal supporting patterns I created in the display as well. I would have printed out other products with each pattern on, for example cushions, coasters or tote bags, to show how the patterns could be used. I learnt that I should have done test prints of the fabric before purchasing the full amount, as the colours were not quite right. I would have also ordered a heavy weight fabric, as I didn’t know how heavy I could get away with.