Play With Me II (St Mary's Works)

After the Play With Me exhibition in the project spaces Robyn decided to put together a second exhibition externally. I decided that I wanted to join and help with the organisation of this.

The exhibition was held at St Mary's Works between 11th and 20th February. My role was to help with curation, organising a venue and writing the artist statements.

To an extent this was a successful exhibition because we brought together a variety of people across the university from first years to post grads. As well as this we had a very successful private view with a large turnout. I found this particularly successful for my own work as it gave me the opportunity to observe a large number of people interacting with my piece (Build Your Own: AK-47 MEGA!).

However, I felt that there were a couple of parts of the exhibition that could have been improved. Firstly the publicity of the exhibition was minimal, this may have been due to the timing of the exhibition being straight after our deadline. The Instagram page was rarely used and the dates of the exhibition were not posted until the day of the private view. As well as this, posters were designed but never distributed around the city. If this exhibition had been at a different venue this wouldn't have been such an issue but St Mary's Works is located in a very quiet and residential part of the city and therefore there is very limited passing traffic. The result of this was that we rarely had anyone visit throughout the exhibition.

Secondly, the size of the space wasn't accounted for when deciding on the number of works we had. Although we did choose all the works that we felt fitted to the theme of play, the space was very big and some pieces felt lost. However, we did try to over come this in the way we displayed the work. For example, when placed on the floor my work felt very small and disappeared into the space so we put together a table for it to sit on which lifted it into the space and made it more apparent. This is meant the viewers didn't have to kneel down to interact with the piece.

Private View images - https://drive.google.com/open?id=11KO6aQkOqfmMagSoHZ1I-LW7Y-50dI2V