John James Marshall thesis.pdf - OpenAIR @ RGU - Robert Gordon ...

5.5 A public exhibition and symposium
It was intended that through conducting a public exhibition the researcher
would:
• obtain access to specific qualitative information from a sample of
contemporary practitioners
• obtain general information relevant to this thesis
• gain insights by recording and making comparisons between qualitative
statements made by participating practitioners
These events also allowed the researcher to survey existing works, explore
future trends, gather audience and peer responses and engage the broader
community of interest around the field of enquiry.
Twenty-two works in total were exhibited. Fast-uk funded four new
commissions and exhibited eighteen existing works. These existing works (from
fourteen sets of practitioners) were selected from a pool of forty-six applicants.
Because of the quality of artistic participation we were able to increase funding
received from MIRIAD and raised partnership funding from folly and Lancaster
City Council 131 . Lancaster City Council allowed the use of CityLab free of charge
(the entire ground floor of the building was leased by new tenants during the
exhibition and they (LCC) were thrilled with this result).
The researcher acknowledges the choice of venue had major implications for the
exhibition. During the three weeks of the exhibition there were 593 visitors to
the exhibition (630 including those that also attended the symposium). The
number of visitors was lower than anticipated. Part of this has to be because the
available audience in Lancaster and the nature of the exhibition venue. This
was offset by a higher than expected amount of interest online. There were
3,641 visits to the Fast-uk website and over 12,500 visits to the folly website
during that same three week period. However, because the exhibition was not
staged in an established gallery in Manchester (as originally intended) this also
had implications on the work that could be shown. Two practitioners selected
for commissions withdrew from the exhibition because the venue was not an
established gallery. The researcher had not foreseen this effect.
131 The total project budget was £64,813 in cash and in-kind contributions. £30,000 was secured from ACE and
£5,000 from MIRIAD.
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