Yesterday was a strange day indeed. Instead of polishing off and topping and tailing my Professional Practice work folder, something that is a bit of an enigma this year, we were called into UCS for an emergency meeting. That meeting was on top of the self-directed team meeting on Monday where we all agreed to the on-line publicity of our degree shows. That was as a direct result of the year group making that decision the week before because of costs. So the tables got turned on us. We are now back to the printed copy. Four weeks from now it will be the first open to the public day at Free Range.

I’m glad I’m not on the Design team. Had I been on it though, draft publications would have been ready in March as placeholders to drop text and images into. We, after all, have known that the dates for the shows are 5th and 12th June for a very long time. That said, hardly anything about these shows is actually student owned. By that I mean most of our decisions are challenged or changed or we are prevented from having complete transparency of financial matters yet for London we have had to raise the £11,000 it is costing to host the show properly. Granted we have been sponsored by UCS in that they bought the boards for use at Ipswich and London and Dulux very generously donated the paint. But it is we who had to find the £7000 rent and the logistics costs. For the bulk of this figure we have relied on the kindness of strangers. It never ceases to amaze me how generous and kind people are especially given the tight constraints most of us are faced with on account of the economy. Without their help and also the disproportionate generosity of some students and their families we would not be going there.

An added issue from yesterday was the flooded exhibition space at UCS. The Curation team, who at the end of the day are just ‘go fors ‘ were already poised like tigers to spring into action and re-design a new dry exhibition space but that was averted by an all clear from the estates team. I sincerely hope the space is properly dry and electrically safe for the 4 day hang in Ipswich. Some very expensive prints are coming off the printers at the moment and I would hate to see them ruined through excess humidity. I have experience of that from an external exhibition last year.

I have curated several shows in my time at UCS and being on this team despite all their hard efforts is just a microcosm of what it should really be like. Yes , managing a team of disparate and sometimes diffident fellow students who do not necessarily live in the same time-zone is very difficult, but I managed it several times over, but hey, they all wanted to work on the project and I was delegated the authority to make decisions and get it done. That is the way projects like this should be run.

More kindness came my way yesterday from Kodak Alaris. I am touched by their kind words and generosity and I’m looking forward to a fruitful relationship with them in my new regionally based ‘Edgelands’ project. That lifted my spirits no end.