Best Wishes Brends, and to everyone who A) redecorated,B) worked behind the scenes, C) exhibited, D) visited openings etc……and finally E) anyone who just popped in for a coffee and a chat and to lend a bit of support to all. Oh, and anyone else I might have missed.

Good luck EVERYONE.

I’ll be using the darkroom and gallery space for my own work, with occasional invited contributors. Something’s planned for the winter, so put this blog in your feed reader. It’ll be quite exciting, I think.

Sorry to hear the project is closing – a valiant effort by all and shouldn’t there really be more examples of this sort of thing working?

I don’t know the project personally and until I followed a ‘tweet’ to here, hadn’t heard of it.

However, the idea is one we’ve toyed with before and on paper it sounds great – a collective of artists all regularly contributing works and their time to ‘man the fort’. The trouble is other’s enthusiasm (when they’re not paying the day to day bills) soon wanes as you’ve suggested above and that’s natural.

What you need is rules – clear and defined that spell out exactly what you expect of ‘contributors’ in terms of time and money and define those ‘work hours’ to being equally productive in promoting the venue rather than just sitting and reading a book waiting for the next person to walk in off the street.

Of course it’s not for everyone – natural shyness or lack of communication skills etc so you’ll also have to decide who is suited to what task best.

At the end of the day, such ventures are still a business – costs must be covered, business must be gained and you’ve got to really want it to succeed as if it were your own business – that’s the hardest part I think.

Regards to you all.
Jonathan.