The “BPD and Me” zine I made was made specifically for the exhibition I organized and put together for my society, The Mentally Chill Society.
As part of this I had to:
- find out if there was interest from members of the society
- find out what spaces were available at UAL for student exhibitions, then apply for the space (a very long application form was involved)
- I had to attend a meeting to learn the do’s and don’ts of the space we were allotted- including the health and safety stuff
- I then got a committee of society members together, they helped me to write the open call brief asking society members to submit work dealing with the topic of mental health, and more specifically their own experiences of it
- Shridula put together the poster which I emailed out to society members and also posted and shared on social media
- we then went through the submissions as a committee and contacted everyone who was successful
- I then had to fill out a risk assessment
- One of the members, Carmella, designed the poster, which I then took elements from to design the sheet with everyone’s names, courses, and descriptions of their work on for the exhibition
- I also filled in an application form for additional funding from the Student Union to cover printing costs, costs of nails/tape/ect, alcohol and other drinks for the private view, ect
- It was a real struggle to get everyone into the space to put their work over the two days we had to install but I managed, and we got everyone’s work hung!
- There was a lot of problem solving involved- for example we realized too late that the labels were going to be too expensive, so we got number stickers for everyone’s work, and then had the sheet with all the info on it for people to take
- the private view went really well and I got lots of positive feedback on the curation and for putting it together!
- this was my first time organizing an exhibition completely from scratch, and my first time curating an exhibition- I learnt a lot about working with larger groups of people, giving up control to delegate tasks, and how to hang work that is vastly different in a way that works and shows everyone’s work in the best way
KAT OUTTEN 