1/04/2018 - NORWICH ART CAR BOOT APPLICATION

I applied for the Norwich Art Car Boot, an annual summer event now in it's fourth year down at the Redwell Brewery arches on the way out of the city towards Trowse. It is a great yearly event filled with local artists selling a variety of artworks, crafts, apparel and other design works. With live music and food on site, it typically proves to be a great event as could be a really great opportunity to distribute some of my work, and also discuss my motivations and interests with audiences.
I filled out my application as 'Sigil Art', the alias for my street works, as I thought this would be most inkeeping with the local theme of the event, since it would be likely that residents of Norwich may recognize some of my artworks from pieces pasted around the city.

I was an idiot once again and didn't screenshot the application form, however I focussed my application around ideas of open access and affordability, as this was the benefit of a 'car boot' style format as opposed to a formal art sale with a different target audience. Proposing creating a series of works across a wide variety of media from prints to stickers, mugs, apparel and badges all for the lowest possible prices and also selling off a large original work (the piece for the Balance exhibition) via raffle, to allow somebody to take home the impressive piece for literal loose change. I also discussed briefly why this accessible nature in my work was so important to me, and touched on my environmental concerns. It suddenly struck me however that I would be competing against craftspeople, illustrators and salespeople alike with this application, as opposed to just gallery artists within the typical institution, and many would undoubtably have complete inventories of stock already created, with tried and tested formatting and presentation methods.

Although I think the art car boot perfectly aligned with how I saw the potential commercial element of practice, as someone who eskews the traditional white cube format and establishment, my actual current position as halfway between fine art student and street artist, and also as between artist and general creative/curator, made me feel like my attention and interest was divided so many different directions, that it could be tricky to capture everything onto a single simple tabletop pitch. I felt like although I wanted to give this opportunity my best shot this time around, it would be an amazing thing to re-apply for as an immediate graduate as my first big step out into the world and really go to town with it as a creative exposition and as a development of a creative commercial direction with combined interests.

I did something similar in the year before I started uni (coming out of my foundation in the same mindset stated earlier) with the Urban Art Fair 2016, and took home around £200 profit, but the thing I noticed most was how creating a massive body of small affordable pieces for display and sale at a single event really forced the development of a creative identity through the work. I think this is because coming up with the inspiration for lots of small decorative pieces really makes you diversify your representations as much as possible and come up with some really outside-the-box aesthetics to make massive variety of equally viable designs that still hold induviduality when viewed as a collective. Also generating a massive inventory of artistic saleable stock feels reaffirming and became a benefit to me with future opportunites such as Upfest 2017, where much of the artwork I sent them for sale was leftover from the Urban Art Fair, as well as some new work.

Thinking ahead to ways I could generate lots of high quality product and maintain affordable prices, I had an idea from one of the artist we feature at Moosey Art, Cote Escriva. One of the pieces we stocked by him came in two formats, first as a large composite print comprised of many small illustrations, and secondly, chopped up and sectioned off by each illustration into a series of much smaller artworks, sold for a much much lower price. In doing this, Escriva effectively produces multiple artworks to suit multiple budgets from a single design sheet.

I thought I could simplify this concept into a selection of 3 simple two colour designs, which could be printed in sequence down a single larger sheet. This could then be divided up in a number of ways, induvidually by design as the example from Escriva, or longways into a joined triptych on single landscape lengths, or left as an entire sheet again. Repeating the 3 simple designs in gradienting colours could be a way to add interest to the larger piece and mark it out as seperate from the smaller cut works.