Found and lost

Spending quite a lot of time in anxious reflection on curation. It comes as I contemplate making a deliberately disorderly exhibition.  For the culmination of HEIST, we're aiming to create a kind of thieves' den, where all kinds of art and artefacts will rub shoulders in a fairly random and disorienting way. We'll then present the very opposite in an online archive where everything is carefully logged, analysed and categorised.

It's probably a physical playing out of tensions within my own practice. Curating has never an end in itself for me - it helps me generate interesting opportunities to work as an artist and to connect with others. However, it seems to be leading me into places I never meant to go.

Through a mixture of necessity and ideology, I've found myself organising exhibitions almost exclusively  in shops (both empty and still trading). Necessity: because there are few low-cost venues in Exeter apart from shops. Ideology: because I like to make exhibitions that can be discovered by everyone - not just my fellow artists - so accessible, central locations are essential.

I've been hugely grateful to the shop owners and letting agents who've accommodated our exhibitions, but I am starting to feel as if I'd like more control over the setting, partly for myself as a curator, but even more for the artists whose work I'm representing. There are simply too many compromises involved.

White cube galleries get a lot of stick, but my recent visit to Structure & Material at Spike Island made me think again. It was such a relief to be in a clean, quiet space where all I had to think about was the art. Rather than having to fight to understand what was going on - what was the art and what was the setting,  I felt the benefits of the curators' expertise and the resources of time, space and experience they had to draw on. Katrina Brown and Caroline Douglas presented me with a thoughtful, meaningful, separate experience; not just part of life's general distracting babble.

As an early-career artist I know I won't always have perfect circumstances under which to show my work or that of others.  If I wait for them to arrive, I'll never get anything done. Some art can surprise you by thriving in such settings. Some wouldn't have happened at all if it hadn't been inspired by the place. And the social aspects of such projects have been illuminating and rewarding.

That's all good stuff, but it doesn't mean I haven't occasionally winced as I've placed a piece of art in an environment where I can see it's fighting for survival, knowing that hours of careful thought and making by an artist are being scrambled in an instant.

www.foundspace.co.uk