Work Experience:
For my work experience, I applied to five different art
galleries, either in Cheltenham or Sheffield, in March 2014. Those galleries were:
The Paragon Gallery
The Wilson Gallery
Castle Fine Art
The Millennium Gallery
Bank Street Arts
To those five galleries, I emailed the following letter:
Dear sir or madam,
I am writing to ask whether you may offer me a voluntary work placement
at your gallery, so that I might gain insight into the profession and experience
of curation.
I’m a second-year student studying illustration at the University of
Gloucestershire with a keen interest in art, and I feel that a placement at
your gallery would be highly beneficial to my education. I also devote much of
my spare time to drawing or painting, so I feel that such a placement would
benefit me in other ways as well.
Although I am currently studying in Cheltenham, Sheffield is my
hometown so travel distance will not be an issue. I am definitely able to work
on any date before April the 4th. After that date I will probably
still be available, but it will largely depend on the day.
I very much hope you would consider me and I look forward to hearing
from you.
Yours faithfully,
Thomas Jones
My First reply came from the Paragon Gallery, stating that
they do not offer work placements:
Bank Street arts stated that although they weren’t looking
for anyone at the moment, I could sign up for their volunteer program:
I also got a similar response from the Millennium Galleries:
It was the Wilson Gallery that was able to offer me a work
placement straight away:
After a few questions about when I’d be able to work and
what I wanted to do, I was offered a placement for four days, starting from the
28th of April:
Over those four days I aided the education and outreach
department, by helping with demonstrations to school classes, as well as
helping show said classes around some of the galleries. This involved a lengthy
tour beforehand so I could I be brought up to speed on the gallery. Other than
that I also helped in the take away department, cataloging items that would be
taken out by schools, university classes and other groups.
Aside from my placement at the Wilson gallery, I also
contributed several illustrations for a radio drama being made by students on
the Radio Production course. They posted about it on the Beinked Facebook group,
and I got in touch with them:
They wanted a little proof of concept, so I quickly sketched
up this:
Their reply:
So we met up on the 28th of March to discuss the
Illustrations, as well as the possible future of the project. They told me that
for now, I’d be working purely for exposure. However they expressed interest in
crowdfunding a series of ‘Code Red’, and if it ever took off then we would
re-negotiate terms.
I was also given this release form:
After signing that, I set to work and produced these over a
period of two days
Which were then used in their crowd-funding campaigns:
And their website:
