Two colleagues and I curated an exhibition based on the Artists’ Books Collection owned by the University of Dundee. It opened on 17 February 2016 until 30 March 2016 Centre Space which is at the Dundee centre for Contemporary Art. We held a preview evening on 16th February 2016 which besides being fun to do was very well received. The stress of pulling the exhibition together was all worth it in the end, even though over the previous two days we had genuinely wondered if it would ever actually happen!
The project brief was simply ‘Montage’ which fit in with another recent exhibition in Dundee’s Cooper Gallery and after much thought, we, the curators, decided to use a theme with which everybody is intimately familiar – dreams. Alongside the books themselves, we wrote a piece of poetry based on a single word which represented each book in the exhibition. These words were also painted around the walls and on the plinths. During the opening event and preview evening on 16 February 2016, the words were also projected on the wall. Thanks to the third member of the team, Doaa, for that.
This poem was recited as a conversation between various people at the opening event which kept everyone wide awake (I hope they wondered if they’d fallen into a dream world – which, of course, is what we wanted!).
Heather and me performing the poem – and an audience looking interested!
One last question – would I do it again? Definitely yes.
Curators: Julie Fielding, Heather McNab, Doaa Yule, – current students at Duncan of Jordanstone Collage of Art and Design (University of Dundee)
