Tuesday 20 May 2014

Work Experience



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:




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