Street View
In January 2021, already in our third lockdown, I had a conversation with my housemates Lily-Peach Forster and Chloe Rylander. We all felt we were lacking in motivation to make work, with no prospects of exhibiting in the near future. So we decided to be proactive, to use what resources we had, and create our own opportunity. Lily suggested the idea of exhibiting artwork in windows, a way to look at art from the street when we're not allowed inside a gallery, so people can see the work on their daily walk. So the three of us (see team below) set to work to find a way of putting this idea into practise. We felt that the challenge of making work would be a positive goal artists could work towards, and seeing art around town might inspire creativity in others. And so Street View was born. The idea was for artists (students and locals, professionals and amateurs) to have the opportunity to display their work in a window somewhere in town, and therefore for local residents to have a piece of art in their home for a week! It was also a way of creating a dialogue between artists and locals, encouraging a sense of community in a potentially very lonely time.
There wasn't a theme or brief the artist had to follow, but we encouraged people to use the idea of the window space, some people using the bars across the windows as frames or ways to display a series of small works, some people made work with a back and a front so the house owners had a piece of art to look at too, and others made full installations to fit the space they were given.
Posters, tote bag and a T–shirt print.
Team and Map.
It started as a very small venture but within a matter of weeks word had spread through social media, leafleting and word of mouth, and by 22 February, the start of our first Street View exhibition, we had over 90 artists involved, each with a window to display in! BBC Radio Cornwall interviewed Lily and we had an article written about Street View in the Falmouth Packet. We had 1,020 followers on our Instagram which we set up in January and we made our own website from scratch, with an interactive map showing every window that was displaying work with a link to each artist's page. We printed merchandise including t–shirts and tote bags, commissioning three artists involved in the exhibition to create designs for us.
We had such a good response from our first exhibition in February that we immediately started planning our next one! Our second exhibition in April 2021, had around 110 artists involved, this time with more shops involved. We planned it so that the exhibition would open on the same day as the shops were able to reopen, so the High Street was bustling with activity for the first time in a while. We ultimately staged our third Street View exhibition in June, to coincide with the G7 summit.
It was an amazingly rewarding process, with people expressing how grateful they were for the opportunities we created.
Street View 1 and 2
Some of the windows I used to show my work.