The Renovation Meeting
Today was the day for the big meeting, where I got to meet other members of the BFP. Marnee was running the meeting and presenting her proposal for the renovations, and taking BFP to the next level. Diego, Marne, Louise, Eloise and myself were there, and Lucas was on FaceTime as he was sick with the flu. It was very interesting to see the dynamics of this team.
The proposal was to have a big clean up and get rid of anything we don't need. A big job but many hands make light work. Together we worked out a schedule of working bee rosters, and I volunteered to drive up next week and take a load of paper to Reverse garbage at Marrickville, which Marne said she would help with. Everyone worked out when they would be available over the next few weeks. It was great to see everyone pitching in.
The meeting finished around midday, so I then went around with Diego and wrote down a list of what has to go, and Diego rang up to find if Reverse Garbage or Bowers would take everything on the list. Most of it they would.
At the meeting, Marnee was talking about how we could take BFP to the next level. She suggested an art market once a month, which she was happy to run as she has experience in doing that. She told everyone that I would be keen to organise workshops. Renting out the space for exhibitions was another suggestion. These were all ways that the BFP could bring in an income.
I have started to think about workshops and how we could get them off the ground. I'm happy to own the role of organising, but from a practical point of view, I cannot be there on the ground when they are held, as I will be at my workshops in Kiama. Things I have to consider are insurance, security, promoting of workshops - do they have a database? Are there already workshops run in the same area? Opposition? Do we just rent out the space and let artists run their own workshops? I think it would be more work, but run more efficiently if I ran it. I would just need someone to open up and set up. Could I get access to the BFP website? Perhaps put a new tab for workshops on the website? These are all things I need to discuss with everyone at some stage, although I think at the moment we should just concentrate on cleaning up and renovating the space. I also want to talk to Marnee about what is involved in running a market. Looking forward to learning a lot from everyone involved.
After the meeting I chatted with Eloise for quite some time and realised that I should have my own website by now and should have been taking good quality photographs of my work along the way. I've now made that one of my goals to do at the end of this semester. I realised after talking to Eloise how important it is to put yourself out there, at least starting on social media.