The costs around Exhibitions / June 22, 2016 by ellie berry

When people come and look at my graduate exhibition I - not quite worry - but wonder if they know how much work and time and thinking went into these small prints sitting quietly on the wall. My piece certainly isn't a large one, and while I try to ignore the thoughts that "size doesn't matter", I know to people who don't normally look at images it often does.

With this post, I want to share more of what when into making a piece for exhibition, and the costs that are incurred by the artist. We are told, as students, that throwing money at a project is not what will get you the grade. There is some truth in that. There definitely needs to be a concept. But once you have that concept, it is indirectly expected that some money throwing should probably be part of it.

My graduation exhibition piece cost:
Printing ----- €250 ----- Printed myself using college facilities.
Framing ----- €405 ---- Framed in Hang Tough. Not without complication, but otherwise fine.
Hanging ----- €30 ---- Screws, mounting board, etc.

In my search for information on funding and affording gallery space, I've come across these PDFs - "The Costs and Funding of Exhibitions" and "Business to Arts: Private Investment in Arts and Culture Survey Report".

Nothing in Stone
Nothing in Stone is an exhibition I'm organising with 13 of my fellow photography graduates.

Gallery Space in Dublin
In my opinion, Dublin is lacking in low cost/affordable art spaces/spaces interested in showing student work. The largest space I have been able to find is Steambox on School St. in Dublin 8. Recently I found a new site called Fill it (currently still in it's 'beta' stage) which allows people to rent out currently empty space in the same style as Air BnB (in fact the website feels exactly the same). While I am really excited to see where this goes, at the moment the spaces on it are a little too expensive for not enough space.

What am I paying:
For 13days I am paying €500 for gallery space, with an additional €140 deposit.

Sponsorship?
Sponsorship is hard to come by. Not impossible. Just hard.
For a show I'm currently organising I spent an evening sending out emails to companies I thought most likely to sponsor a small art event. I didn't hear back from a single one. However, every exhibition that I have been involved in has been sponsored in some way by local shops or places that one of the artists works.

Current sponsorship:
€200 from Tiger. Huge thanks to Tiger and Hue Hale for organising this.

Promotion
Now that there is only one month left before opening, promoting the event will start. Posters, pice lists, websites, there are some many things we would love to do.

Dialect (Book) / November 5, 2015 by ellie berry

A small sample of a book I made during the winter semester of my 2nd yr in college.

Pretty photos thrown in a pile / February 10, 2015 by ellie berry

More photos from Tallinn! None of these photos really go together, but it's a Tuesday! So they're going out like this. Mixture of shots from the Palace and my walk to it.

Cyanotypes / January 13, 2015 by ellie berry

Last week I submitted the Alternative Processes project I've been working on. I realised that Friday that I hadn't scanned 90% of the prints I had done. So here are a couple of the the Cyanotypes I made - my scanner is horrendous. It left streaks all over the pages. Anyway, here we go!

The images above are the three final images I submitted. Originally, they were all shot on Illford 400 XP(5?) in black and white (they're actually part of my Luas series). For these images, I wanted to recreate the idea of wiping away a patch of the window to be able to look out onto the outside world.

The above a a couple of my work prints and how I progressed to my "wiped glass" effect.

Working with Negatives / November 17, 2014 by ellie berry

So much to post and so little time.
I've spent a week in Berlin, photographed the Irish Youth Lead Climbing Championship - and on the same weekend, gone through 48hrs with only 3 and a half hours sleep. I've been accepted by the Estonian Art Academy (YAY!) to go study there from this coming January until the end of May, and I have a project due in a week with no final images.

So this is just a catch-up, and a post to show some negatives I've made of some of my Luas photos to use in Alternative Processes (I actually printed them today, but the prints were too wet to bring home).

Lego / October 10, 2014 by ellie berry

I think I've never actually shared some of the lego photos I took last year in college. Really fun to do a non-serious shoot!

Blue Hands / October 6, 2014 by ellie berry

Today was my first ever attempt at what I have decided to (possibly) be the most fun part of photography - or at least the most "creative" in the sense of getting your hands dirty and having freedom to experiment with chemicals and dyes. I'm doing alternative processes.

Starting with what's generally said to be the easiest, I played around with Cyanotypes. My hands are a patchy blue after flicking paintbrushes, and look quite corpse-like. I love it.

So here are all my test prints from today!

Even though the masking tape didn't work quite as well as I intended, I almost like the streaks. Almost.

The above (I know roses are cliche, but I had the negative from shooting 5x4 last year) were all printed using old negatives. After (below), I just grabbed some leaves from outside and tried to print them.