Matt Burrows Talk

Thank you for coming. I just want to give a warm welcome to Matt Burrows, who is the curator and manager at Exeter Phoenix. So, if any of you haven't heard of Exeter Phoenix, they have some fantastic shows, so you should definitely get on down there.

Hi everyone, thanks for the time, Katie. It's really good to see you today. I think that's the biggest I've ever seen my face. As it says there, I'm the community gallery manager at Exeter Phoenix. This is an artwork in the windows from back in 2013 actually, a piece by some artist called Lowe Profile who say never, never give up.

And as you can see it's quite a big old-fashioned building and it goes back from that a lot so there's loads going on there.

 

Right in the front as you come in are the two main art galleries that I run. It's part of our main visual arts program. But we've also got cinema, it's a big music venue, theatre, there's loads of workshops where dance classes and art classes and other things happen. In the basement, there's a community radio station, a recording studio and a print workshop. So, it's really, really busy. Loads going on, loads of people in and out. And in terms of an art gallery, really broad audiences, really general audiences for people who are looking for contemporary art, to people who come from coffee or to buy tickets for gigs. So, it's a really great place to work because there's so much going on, so many people there.

 

I'm going to talk a little bit about how I came to do the job that I do and the route that I took and then I'm going to talk a bit. I know some of you guys are open to putting shows together so I kind of structured it a little bit around the things that you might think about when exhibiting shows. I've worked there for about 15 years, so a really long time. It's changed a lot in that time. And I've worked with loads and loads of artists. We tend to kind of work with artists. There's a catch on phrase, which is emerging artists. So that can be anything, really, from just left university, first time exhibiting, to people who are really quite established, in fact.

But maybe what we offer is something very different from the commercial art world where people are selling their work in what the kind of big London based gallery world. We offer something a bit more connected to audiences and often, it's working with people who it's their first major solo exhibition. So, we do quite a lot of solo shows when the artist gets to show their work, maybe on the biggest scale, the first time they've had to do that.

 

So, as you walk into that building up those steps, there's these two gallery spaces on the left and on the right, and we got some money to do them up about back in 2018 and they're really beautiful spaces. They look quite fancy. And there's lots of reasons why that's helpful, not least because it's a really busy, hectic building. And they really, really demonstrate that they are different spaces. They're white. They're clean. They have a different architecture going on.

 

So, I did my degree in fine art in Bristol in the early 1990s. I haven't got really any photos from that because it's got a pre-digital camera, just about. But I moved up to London after finishing, not really knowing what to do, but I wanted to not go straight back into education, which in fact I didn't have a deal in the end with a master's degree. But I wanted to really just encounter a bit more of what was going on there at the time in the art world. It was just as YBA, young British artists were taking off and there was a moment where London Art will just seem utterly cool and the place to be.

 

And one of the things that I quickly found was a volunteer position that turned into a paid job working, with a group called Constructed Individuals and they were building this community centre on a kid's adventure playground. I'd come out of mostly working in sculpture, so I was producing the stuff and making, and this seems like an opportunity they were offering training in exchange for labour, and so this building in the middle of the photo, just didn't exist when we started. They'd done the foundations and it's like a super eco building. So, it was all timber, recycled, reused. It was one of the first buildings in London to have solar panels that fed back into the grid, and we worked with Greenpeace to do that at the time.

 

The reason I put it in was, it was this kind of other way that the skills that I picked up in this project, actually kind of fed into this other creative real-world situation where I came on board as a volunteer, got to work with carpenters and different kind of builders, all with kind of a bit of a green creative ethos. And very quickly they sort of worked through that and then they took me on and started paying me to help finish off the building and work with them.

 

And it was lovely because it was in this really kind of slightly shambolic but super nurturing social environment with kids from the states and around. It was quite a kind of problematic part of East London. It was this little island, this little oasis of community, spirit, and how it can be. So, it was one of those things where I didn't think I'd be doing that, but I did that for quite a while, working with this architect, thinking about design, he was talking about design, the time and materials and things.

 

And then as that came to an end, I picked up a job with a company that moved art all around London, and I worked with them, moving art and installing art, mostly paintings, some sculptures, for a couple of years, and it was an amazing experience because we worked with artist studios where they were making the art, we would take it to galleries that were exhibiting the art, we'd pick it up from galleries that were selling the art and take it to clients' houses who'd put the art, often hanging it on their walls as well. We would go to businesses that were buying art or inventing art for their big headquarters buildings or for their staff to have pictures on the walls. We would go to museums.

So, we got to see all these different bits of the art world, from the bits with no money to the bits with disgusting amounts of money to the public bits to the private bits. It was an interesting educational, I suppose, of how it all works.

 

Off the back of that, there's a company I worked for, I also started working as a studio assistant for a sculptor called Alex Hartley. This is the kind of work he was making then. This is a glass wedge shaped box with frosty front and a photograph of a mid-20th century architecture in Syria. It did this lovely trick, because the glass was moving away an angle from the photograph. It was an optical illusion of three-dimensional depth. It looked like you were looking into a three-dimensional space.

And they were really hard to make and complicated and took a lot to move around.

They were really easy to create. And I worked with him for a while, just of helping him do the idea, and so picked up this different set of skills, he was working towards a big exhibition of lots of pieces of work, so he needed this extra help.

 

And off the back of that, I ended up working for the gallery that represented him.

So, some commercial galleries often would be a bit like a record label. So, they'll have a bunch of artists who they represent in a way that a record label might have a bunch of music acts that they represent and look after. And this gallery was called Victoria Mirror Gallery and they had this big space, sort of an adjust open, this huge space in East London having been in a time space before, I guess because the art world was really taking off financially and running around that time.

 

I came in initially as a technician to help hang the paintings and move the work and wrap it up and unwrap it. And then later I became project manager so I worked really closely with our artists on planning shows, on moving things around the world. So big space, lots of art, and lots of art, quite high profile, quite high pressure, because there was some expectation and money, but it was also really exciting time to be around, and there were things like parties and dinners, and sometimes they did champagne, and as a young person that was brilliant to do, although sometimes it wasn't quite clear if I was at work or not at work. I've also looked after some just truly extraordinary artists. One of the things that I discovered working for a gallery is that you live with the art for the time the exhibition's on, so every day I want to work. And I live in an exhibition with huge paintings like this.

I just got to be around them, and something about that really seeped into my soul in a way that was really unexpected. I realise that it's a privilege, and it's a privilege I still have in my job today.

 

So, we just opened an exhibition in the gallery on Saturday, and I spent a few days with the artist, really hectically trying things out and putting the exhibition together and then he's gone home, he lives in London, we had an opening with people came, events and glasses of wine and they all left. I live with his exhibition now, and I get to know the work really well over that time.

It is weird because that whole bit of the art world works on obscene money by incredibly rich people, by incredibly expensive things. But mostly didn't touch my job because I was working with the artists and helping them achieve what they needed to do.

Starting a young family, we wanted to escape and so we left London and we came down to Devon and got out of the way. The first thing I did was I worked at SpaceX, which sadly doesn't exist. That's a gallery in Exeter, obviously the X being Exeter, which was a public contemporary art gallery. So, a similar kind of art, but a totally different kind of attitude. So, nobody was there to sell the work, it wasn't about money, it was about the art, about what the art meant, why it was interesting, why it might be relevant to members of the general public. And that was a massive change in what we were thinking about, what I was thinking about.

 

I was in sort of project manager role there, helping plan and execute exhibitions, from shipping the work around the country, to finding the materials that we needed to build walls or spaces or plinths to put things on closely with the artist and the organisation, co-ordinating the technicians to help us to do that kind of thing, working really closely with the director. He was also the curator.

 

While I was doing that, I was going to Exeter Phoenix. I worked there part-time and I also occasionally did some freelance work for Exeter Phoenix and they had this space and if you imagine in the middle of this, the green lift, it's just a little niche in the wall by their accessible entrance. My kids were tiny so I would come in with a buggy in the accessible entrance, the van entrance. There was this niche and it didn't have anything in it. It would often have some old flyers in. It didn't really say welcome, the way the front door was did.

 

I asked the director then if I could take this on as a little curatorial project because I was looking for something to do and I blagged a little bit of money out of them and made this door, and cut out a hole in it and put glass in it, I called it Gallery 3333. I've never been any good at naming things and I put the dimensions into Google and it told me that the dimensions inside were very close to cubic meters of space and that seemed to fit quite well. And it's still there now. And it's deep, about 30 centimetres deep. So, we try not to just put something 2D in there, it tends to be sculptural or little installations really, often for artists to try stuff out and see if it worked before something they'd maybe like to do on the inside of the room.

 

Here's just a few examples of the kinds of things that we've had in there. The one in the middle is the most recent thing we just put in last week, an artist called Laura Walter, made of steel rods and then this material she makes from chopping up discarded fabric textiles and dying them. She mixed it with organic substances that sort of turned into a kind of balloon, just kind of like a textile, but it's completely recycled and environmentally good.

So, that was my first step from being somebody facilitating for a curator or an artist into being the person choosing the stuff to put in there and making the exhibition happen. And not long after that, my predecessor left and I applied for the job, and I got the job in the gallery. Straight away I realised that the way that I best did the job was by working with an artist, so this is a really early, young me, working with an artist to construct a sculpture like an installation from scratch in the gallery space with some student volunteers in the background there. That was the kind of way that I really liked to work, and still do, to an extent, when we bring in new work, I often approach an artist and say, what would you like to do? Is there anything you want to do? How can we help you achieve that? With very little money, but I think I've bought loads of know-how, how you can achieve stuff, what materials you can use to make things happen.

 

It's very much an unapologetically engaged, contemporary, critically engaged, contemporary programme. So, I'm really interested in artists who are exploring ideas and then presenting that to the general public in a way that I hope they can just enjoy and be interested and have their interest peaked. I'm not that interested in just shipping in something that's already been somewhere else and is just plonked in the space. That can be great but it's just not really what I'm interested in doing in the space.

 

So, I went back through some really old photos. This is the space as it was when I first was there, I was thinking about that some of you guys are going to put these shows up and some of the basics of curating. When I finished my degree, we didn't really have a thing like professional practice then. And we came to our final exhibition, no one had ever really discussed how you attach something to the wall, how high it might be, any of that stuff, which now is the kind of bread and butter of my exhibition making.

 

But here's like a really conventional set of framed pictures and one of the most basic rules of thumb is about having a central hanging point. So whatever size the pictures are, the middle of them is all on the same height. That can be anything you like, but the rule of thumb is 150 centimetres. People quite often talk about eye height, and they make the mistake of hanging things where the middle of the picture is actually an eye height, but that's almost always way too high, 150cm is a really good rule of thumb for a nice height, that everybody can take on.

 

There's a lot about curating that is about just feeling like they are in the same space. There's a whole lot of different things going on, but you can just see the same kind of idea, and what it does when there's different things, it adds this sense of coherence. These things are meant to be together in the world, even if they're totally different, and the thing that joins them together is this kind of coherent knowledge.

 

Rules are made to be broken. This is another way of thinking about hanging a show where there are loads and loads of work. This was a show called 100 Nudes. And I didn't curate this, so I invited someone else to bring it to Exeter, but they invited 100 artists, most of them were abstract painters, to paint to respond to the idea of the nude. And then it was a really good, they just had loads of fun hanging there.

And so, they call this salon style. So, it's a different way of going, we've got loads of work that we're going to fill the space with, there's still a sort of sense of purpose to it.

 

This is a group show that's just a total riot; lots of the work is actually printed as posters and then pasted onto the wall in a paper place, either like lots of the same thing, or these were big, old, old type prints and objects. Everybody's work was overlaid, one person's work was overlaid on another's, and that was the premise of the show. In another situation, one artist might have been really annoyed that their work was polluted by someone else's work. One of the outcomes of this show was like a newspaper publication, so the work was also printed in this little newspaper, and it was part of this sort of sense about being disposable and throw away and cheap and that there's no particular order to be. So, we're sort of playing with that idea that you might discard the idea that each artwork should have its own space and be revered in that way, which is the norm. So, it is deliberately undermining the norm.

 

Other simple things are just painting, painting the place, another colour just steps you away from the right gallery space into some other kind of thing. That just lifts the work, perhaps, or refers to the theme behind the work.

 

This is a painting shown by Helen Mawton. So, in space, giant woodcuts out of sheep's clothing. So originally these were just the cuts that prints were made of.

And in fact, on the left there you can see a print that's half of one of the woodcuts that's at the far end of the room on the right. It's kind of stone age kind of. And this is a kind of graffiti inspired artist from Cedar Lewis and filling the walls from floor to ceiling, really kind of maxing out the space so that when people walk in it, it kind of does something other than the kind of polite gallery home. That's like a huge print, paper print, pile on wire with build-on clips, kind of like market store type clips.

And then, so that's a really provisional, quick, kind of on-the-fly method of showing work. And then on the right there's the convention of drawing. And on the table, there you've got to see it's a huge giant book, and it's these big books. Again, a bit like a sketchbook, but a bit more of an art object that people could read through.

Sometimes The gallery is also a performance space. These are artists, this is an artwork rather, being kind of activated by musicians, including a mic'd up sewing machine, no one's sewing at the moment. So, the gallery also becomes like a platform for activity.

 

Same gallery space, this is a performance art piece by an artist called Susie Green who has proposed this piece as part of a group open exhibition at the Rone, She proposed this piece called Fluid Medium, where she is the life model and the tutor, and there's banging techno music and lights changing all the time, and she's invited people to come to the space and a lot of them have got like charcoal on the end of long sticks and they're drawing directly onto the gallery walls and It's all kind of quite chaotic and experimental. And the idea of this was that it might or might not leave us with an interesting gallery to then put an exhibition into that this was part of.

And in fact, that's what we did to see and built this wall, sort of deconstructed last of all wall, because a lot of these works were black and white and you know there's some colour in there. But you can see on the wall where there's work on top of these audience members, charcoal drawings of Susie's life drawing.

 

Sometimes the curator has to do things for the artist, like being a performance for the life's make. Sometimes there's these things like, this is a performance by two artists, Dominic Hallen and Jasmine Corp. It's a kind of food generosity performance where they ended up making a meal. Well, they didn't make a meal. They talked about making a meal and in fact they phoned in the takeaway, they sort of invited the audience.

 

Jazzlean's just been nominated for the term prize, so it's really lovely that, you know, this was about six or seven years ago, we worked with her, and it's part of the sort of journey that we hope to be on. And the reason, they've exchanged identities, they've just given an artist talk, they've given each other an artist talk.

So, Jazz Lean is a Scottish Sikh artist and Dominic works under the name Dominic from Luton and he's an ardent Luton town supporter. So, Jazz has got a Luton kit and she's drawn all of Dom's tattoos on with a sharpie and he's kind of gone for a sort of stereotypical saltire face paint Scottish flag face paint and sorry in this kind of bonkers performance that ended up with us all being in a curry.

 

Sometimes you get to do things like bring in a 90s arcade machine as part of an exhibition. This is Street Fighter, essentially. I don't know if you know that one. Rewritten, hacked and rewritten by an artist called David Glandy, where all of the characters are the different versions of the artist's personality, including one that's just the artist, just David Glandy. He's got absolutely no power at all. I think everybody can kill him in every level. But that was in the game of Glandy, and loads of people just come in and play. You don't have to pay anything. They just sit and play and just go fight it.

 

This is an artist called Simon Bayliss, a Cornish artist and these are essentially haiku paintings, painted in fluorescent paints and we deck the whole in out in the light.

So, they're painting, paint the paintings, turn them into the gallery. So, we're just, often it's led by the artist, but also with a real candid attitude of like, what do you want to do? What would be the perfect way of doing this? How would this look if you put it in a gallery and expected people to come and see it? Sometimes you work outside the gallery when you can.

 

This is a project, this is an artist called Theo Simpson, who works around print and architecture and we managed to do a project with in sort of bus stop advertising spaces where we were sponsorship. And we put them all around town and quite enjoyed having absolutely no branding at all. So, there was nobody would really get a sense trying to sell anything, including us. So, there was no real sense that it was by Exeter Phoenix. But we had print in various locations. We only got to pick up with a map of where they were.

 

So yeah, sometimes we're out in the street. Sometimes we do things. This is a wall built across the gallery to make a video space dark using a really cheap sort of black shed roof material from B&Q. I love how they did it, they've done that incredibly cheap. That totally changed the nature of the space. It smelled funny, it looked, it sucked up the light, it's a matte black. And just, I really like the way that materials indicate different things, like the difference between a white wall and a black wall, it just starts already before you look into the space, seeking something about what's going on, what we're thinking.

 

This is an exhibition by Paul Carter, where the kind of the walls are the work. And they make this kind of maze through the gallery. He works a lot with concrete. And these are glazed panels with concrete and building detritus and stickers and then they are hung on this metal wall system and they could be moved from different places emotionally. In the middle now there's a sort of video. So yeah. This is his work again. We got someone to render the whole back wall in a really light concrete. It wasn't actually concrete, it was sort of sand and cement, like mixed, but so it was like a kind of carpenter or something.

 

Again, it's really nice when people come into the space and find something different from the last time they were here. This is a piece where people can make a pop noodle in this space. It's not my idea, the video is a video that equates the four minutes it takes to make a pop noodle with the artists who brought up in the 1980s when there was an incredibly close threat of nuclear war. And there was this idea that you get four minutes in the morning before Armageddon hit. Sadly, not many miles away from that now. But he made this video that equated, this is a Pot Noodle timer, a format timer, and then the text that he remembers from growing up in the 80s, being given to them at school and on the telly about how they hide under the kitchen table. He's about this maybe. But he said, and then he said, well, I'd love to, I'd love people to be able to have a Pot Noodle, or also as an artist with no money, Pot Noodle is one of the things that he kept in the studio, some cheap food. And they are all vegan, apart from the cheese and onion one. So, part of my job was to go and buy pot noodles every few days to stock up the pot noodles in the exhibition and do the appropriate health and safety which we possibly wouldn’t get by now, with boiling water and burning. So really kind of messing with what people expect to see, whilst still trying to make sure people respect the space, respect the art.

 

This is a video installation where the sound track tried hard on it, and we found a local harp player to come in and do a performance at the opening, an instant performance in the space responding to that video.

 

This is in the revamped space; it's looking a bit fresher here. This is a show by Tanya Kovac. Here we've got hundreds of sheets of paper making up this wall-sized ink door. They're all just paper with these ink lines that's made across them. the seas and the cold blue chill.

 

Here's a show by an artist who paints onto bedsheets, and works a lot with chance and with staining and leaving them out in the garden and bringing them back in again. And every time they're shown, they're put up differently so they're effectively a different painting. And it's part of a project where they're paired with the deeper carpets from a collector who we've managed to borrow them off. These are sort of antique objects that normally in a museum you would never be able to handle in this way, but they were very, very relaxed about what we did with them. They were just really happy to have them out of storage. And so, her work was sort of interactive.

 

This is a sort of interactive piece by an artist called Nicky Hurst. All these sticks have got a letter on top. They cut out fruit boxes from the market stores and they're on the boxes and things. So, they tend to be from all over the world, as such, Jamaica and various different places, South America. And then people can arrange them on the other wall into boxes and things. And then we'd have to come and ask you about painting. But the rubrics didn't stay for too long, so that's what the British people do. So yeah, what I've been thinking about all this is, and when they can, they can't interact. And how you suggest that people can do that, even if there's no one there to say, this is what you're supposed to do.

So, using the architecture of the space to, and for example painting the wall yellow, and this is where the words can be, and the sticks that I just left over on the other room opposite.

 

Same artists work, I have a gallery space and I just put this one in because right in the middle there's a really conventional white print, It's the kind of object of choice for putting things on in a gallery. It's pretty clear that that isn't part of the artwork.

It's not the sculpture, it's just a thing. It's an extension of the gallery one. And I think about this stuff a lot. What's the intention? What are my signalling to the audience by what we do with the artwork, where you position it? What would be the difference if that link was only done there? It's a bucket of sand essentially, which he sticks in it. Would people think they could pick it up and move it. So those things resonate all the time about how are people coming to the artwork? What choices are you making? Is it my choice as a curator or is it the artist's choice how I want to present it?

And just to give you a sense of how that can play out, so this is Exeter from September, April from 2019. And instead of doing that, we used concrete blocks which are pretty cheap, but also, they are pretty destructible, so we could take them back to the builders' merchants and give us a refund after this. We just decided in these new very posh spaces we've made; it was kind of nice to do something that felt a bit disruptive and gave a sense that there was something else going on.

So, all of the sculptural works, even sort of the presentation floor-based ones, were on these concrete blocks. And it just did something different, and it shows you don't have to have this thing in white, since you can kind of connect these things together.

There's not a sense that they're the same artist, but it just, I don't know what it says.

It says something about our intention, about all of these works and what they're doing and how there's maybe a bit of disruption, disruptiveness going on.

Because some of the work, for example, this is a sculpture above the doors inside the gallery.

 

The whole artwork is like an awning. Like a kind of awning that you might have in your patio and I'm trying to put a shot with this kind of weird mashed up fox sculpture on it. And we kind of put it above the doors. It didn't have to be above any doors. We kind of put it above the doors just to kind of make it, maybe make people question whether it was even a piece of art or not. It was supposed to be there or not. But We might not even notice it because it's up above their heads. And this sort of just play for the way of thinking about heads. Sometimes we use things like billboards. The idea of a billboard and what billboard is, this is an artist that ends in a castle.

 

This artist, this is Cheryl Sattlefin in the black outfit there. She was really interested in optical disruption and she found this fabric, a cheap, stretchy fabric of black and white stripes. It was really hard to look at. And we ended up, she was experimenting really what happens when you do something like that. Some people found it an incredibly difficult thing to stand in front of, but again just really changing the nature.

 

This is a tiny little painting of picture, it's only about 25-30 centimetres square on the whole wall of the gallery and giving artwork space can sometimes be magic.

It can really give it; offer it the way it needs to look like. This is an artist called Peter Macki Wilde. It's all his work, but he works in these really different ways.

So, there's a video, sort of also an installation on the floor. This is a piece making a boat boy found on the beach and painted. And I'll just look around on the other side. This is a sort of textile piece made from an old sleeping bag and his grandfather's kimono and various other things. And we've chosen to found a bamboo pole. So, there's a kind of nod to his kind of cultural heritage as a half Japanese person.

Because he bought this blanket in and we had to find a way to hang it on the wall and it just sort of made sense to me.

 

So just thinking about, again about playful or imaginative ways you can achieve the practical goal of presenting to the world. This is a show just, we came out of COVID where we invited artists. We have 10 artists based around our region and 10 artists are based around the region of the gallery over near Oxford and they exchanged artworks and they're two simultaneous exhibitions. And the artwork had to fit in an A4 envoys as you posted it. And so, this is the kind of way that we used to do it.

And they were all different, but there was a kind of, some kind of sense in the way that they've laid out. There's 20, because there are two lots of 10 artists, and there's 20 pieces right in the show.

 

One of the pieces is this stone that it's got loads of holes punched in it with a hole punch. And we hung it in the window so that the light would come through.

It wasn't designed to be hung in a window. But again, just thinking about what you can do, when you can do playfully, when it doesn't do the work any harm to do something unusual and interesting with it. Using the space that we've got in a different way in another way.

 

And this is a really recent exhibition that just finished where the same window is where an artist has put this motif in the window that when on a cloudy day you wouldn't even necessarily notice it was there but on a sunny day it projects these shapes. The shape is where I sit in cross-legged on the ground and just drawing around it. I can really see the thing when I'm doing kids, drawing their bodies on a big bit of paper. I'm not going to explain why, but it's a motif. It's an artwork that is almost invisible, it almost doesn't exist, it's just made from light and gel so we can really feel it. And yet it can completely fill the space. Not only are there these patterns on the floor but it makes the whole space pink so it's this kind of almost doesn't exist and it can kind of fill the whole space.

 

Sometimes we work with things like VR, which is an artisan artist with John Walter, who they've made. Once the experience of putting a VR goggles on to be also interesting for the people not in the VR goggles. So, he makes these kind of ludicrous puppet masks going in the front. And the costumes hanging up, our costumes from the characters in the VR, his norm and his art have made.

It was a really utterly insane film about a cult that existed in Exeter. So, thinking about what, you know, if the art isn't even there, what can we present to people?

How can we make it look interesting and attractive? So, using lighting and bringing in some of these costumes and hanging them as if their artworks essentially.

 

So, the show by an artist called Alexis Solgrance, who's probably near here, and she, some of her work is inspired by religious painting, typically of a sort of a Madonna child. Of the typical Madonna and Child. And she did a sort of experimental kind of residency in the gallery space for a couple of weeks and then set up an exhibition. And she had these curtains that was dyed, know that had been sort of bleached by windows, and she wanted to do something with it. So, we were just thinking about an altar piece or something that looked a little bit like a nod to which she actually took place.

 

It might be time for some questions if you want to. I'm going to go through the last few days. I get too interested by explaining everything that's in here, but just to give you a sort of sense of the kinds of things that go on.

 

I'm talking about, thinking about radically different things, all in one space, how they might relate to each other, and how visually they're all similar. This is a piece that we did on the outside of the building. Just a couple of years ago, from the COF conference in Cornwall. These were praises to do with the things that the protesters were demanding. And they were death-based artists. And they came back and said, we've got these signs. What can we do with it? And we said, it wouldn't be brilliant to put it on the outside of the building as our Christmas lights, so we can add a chair and take a little bit of a look for Christmas. And those are the kind of things we do.

 

Hopefully that just gives a sense of the kind of the breadth of what's possible and the breadth of the kind of things that you can think about and end up what you do.

Yeah, it's fascinating the way that you can transform the states in a variety of ways.

It can be a creative process, an artistic process in the same way. It doesn't have to be dull. But also, it can be really beautiful and really clean.

 

Does anyone got any questions from that? As you are preparing for your final show, I'm sure people have got some questions, so don't be shy.

Take a look at Ex the Contemporary Open. This is open at the moment. Every year we do an open call for artists. They can be based anywhere in the country, at any point in their careers. For a small thing, you put in up to four artworks and then here I can write a couple of other artists or curators from other places to come and help.

So, you can sit up there and show. And it's always an interesting show and I hope you can do it. It'll be in September. So, if you don't apply and you're not in it, come and see it. Because it's a really great opportunity to see a bunch of work. And some of those shots at the end there were from that where we just throw, we've got stuff, there's no theme but we're looking for a way to make it make sense.

 

And I think so for example if you guys are doing a student show, for example, or putting together a show, then doesn't necessarily need to be a thing where all of the work is about the environment or a thing. But you want to try and find a way that they start speaking to each other. And that's what my thing, a bit of that show shows. And we get some really great work here.

 

Any questions? Even if it's something really practical that you're trying to get your head around.

I mean, Instagram's obviously great. If you can bear it as a way of just, it's a visual, visually communicating your practice. Having a website is really, really helpful for artists. A lot of artists now are kind of, you know, it is hard work, it can cost a lot of money. So, they're opting to just maybe just be on Instagram. As a curator, it's not a great way of me finding out what a website can do. It can be a bit of a bio about youth. They can be a bit of blurb about overarching what you're about, your contact details so I can actually get in touch with you and say, what you like or what you're doing, so I can have a chat about it. So, if you can, just make exhibitions of some kind happen if you possibly can. You've just got to do it yourself. The world is too hard to expect somebody else to do it for you. And by doing that, you just make things happen. And that can be in your living room or in a shed or anywhere.

If you and some people you like get together, you can just start making something happen. You can invite some people along. There have been some incredible projects that almost no one has seen document the hell out of it.

And it's happened. You have an exhibition. And those things can just kind of snowball. And I'd say just if you possibly can, just make stuff happen and document it and get it out there.

 

The way that people get shows is by networking, not in a kind of business-y type way, but by just making connections. And if you see an artist that you like, someone else doing something, you invite them to be in a show that you're putting on, even if it's just in your living room or in a shed or, you know, and then you've suddenly got this connection to them and their network and all their people who know them will be looking at your work and sort of become interested in you. And I think there's a lot you can do by just putting your fingers in. And I tend to find artists by seeing, by them being visible, by them showing that somebody I'm already aware of and me seeing that. I'll put them in Google or I'll look at their Instagram or whatever it is.

So rather than expecting it to just be a thing that's sort of presented to me, it's just about being active in whatever way you can.

 

And its amazing what artists working together, supporting each other, can achieve.

And particularly somewhere like this part of the world that we live in, where there isn't a big city that's going for all of these kinds of things going on. If artists support each other and look out for each other, then they actually go the extra mile, so going to each other's things, go to each other's openings and shows, make me like that, you won't be like that into the world. Because those connections and networks of what build a career, which takes you somewhere. I said about Jazz Lee, who's just won the prize. She came from one, she was in London at the time, although she's mostly based in Glasgow, but She came down to Exeter, which is a small city in the south-west that isn't particularly part of Mecca, because we invited her to be part of a project that sounded fun and it wasn't a huge amount of money, we could pay for a train fare and a small amount of money. But that introduced her to people who she's worked with since or based on her view. And introduced her to audiences, so that just doing things and doing that was really important.

Photos from Matt's slide show presentation: