Tag: Susan Davis

Freeing the Spirit: Part One

Freeing the Spirit or Causing Chaos: 35 Years with a Scottish arts’ organisation

Our former Programme Manager Susan Davis has had quite the career with Fife Contemporary! After curating an exhibition of historic Scottish silver in 1986, Susan was employed as the Touring Exhibitions’ Administrator (the TEA lady…) in 1987 for the Crawford Centre for the Arts. The following year, the organisation became independent from St Andrews University (as the Crawford Arts Centre) and her role, as the only member of staff to remain in post, broadened to become Exhibitions’ Assistant. For the next 35 years, as Susan’s job title, remit, and the rhythm of the organisation changed, she was given wonderful opportunities to work on between 400 and 500 exhibitions, residencies, projects and events, meeting artists at all stages of their careers, working in a wide range of media, and also members of the public from all walks of life.

We asked Susan to summarise some of her favourite experiences and memories…

Part One: Exhibitions

I was under no illusion, when asked to write a blog post about some of my favourite exhibitions and projects over these decades, that this would be a hard task. Many people spend their working lives with colleagues they have scant respect for, toiling in a profession they hardly like. My experience has been the opposite. Over the years, I’ve had the good fortune to be part of an organisation that has flourished in the face of change, and whose present characteristics were formed in its early years and refined over the decades.

Art or Craft? 

Much time has been spent trying to pigeonhole artists and their work in terms of media. An abiding feature of the Crawford/Fife Contemporary’s programme which I have always liked was an exploration of the work of artists at the intersection of visual and applied art. Rather than sticking to definitions, exhibitions and projects celebrated the blurring of media and the exciting work it produced. 

Freeing the Spirit – Contemporary British Abstraction was the first exhibition produced for the Crawford Arts Centre in September 1988. Curated by postgraduate Art History student Catherine Wallace, it included work by well established artists like Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Bert Irvin and Philip Reeves, but also work by recent graduates like Graham Fagan and Lisa Gribbon, using diverse materials like railway sleepers, slates, and mixed media on board. 

Ring of Alder (summer 1991) – Valerie Pragnell took woven alder/willow to a large scale with her statuesque sculptures and evocative drawings that filled the main Crawford gallery. 

Cover Story: A New Look at Bookbinding (Mar/April 1994) – many designer bookbindings are sculptural objects as this exhibition, curated by postgraduate Museum & Gallery Studies’ students, University of St Andrews, showed. I had seen an image of the beautiful binding by Faith Shannon of The Book of Job – a single garnet for a drop of blood as the end point of the initial ‘J’, cut into cream leather, with the slit backed in gold; so very simple yet impactful – and felt bookbinding could be an interesting exhibition theme. The exhibition encouraged St Andrews-born Derek Hood, then working in the university bindery, to study and develop his bookbinding career. (He was featured in our Craft Pods’ tour 2019-20.) 

Presence and Absence – Contemporary Lettering (Oct-Dec 2003), curated by Manny Ling, University of Sunderland, looked at the many ways lettering was used creatively – from an installation of poetic letters on acrylic by Valerie Coffin Price (also featured in the 2020 StAnza Poetry Festival exhibition Berlin Water), and the delicate calligraphy on ceramics of Mary White, to Gurpreet Singh’s exploration of Sikh language through digital artworks.

The Dangers of Sewing and Knitting (with the Collins Gallery, Glasgow, 2005) highlighted the many textile skills of artist Deirdre Nelson, and also her great knowledge and understanding of the history of making and makers. Her artworks demonstrated the unseen suffering that went on in the production of clothing and textiles – as much a social history lesson as an example of excellent techniques.

Cycling up the hill with my dad (St Andrews Museum, 2007) was a lovely examination by textile artist Claire Heminsley of the artistic stimuli she and her late father, ceramicist David Heminsley, shared. Though working in different disciplines, drawing underpinned their work.

The Marzee Collection (2009) was an ambitious project with Galerie Marzee in Nijmegen. It comprised an event at House of Falkland, an installation at St Andrews Museum of contemporary European ‘wearable sculptures’, with photographic portraits by broad daylight (Ross Gillespie & Tricia Malley) and filmed interviews of the jewellery wearers. CPD was organised for teachers, workshops with 3 Fife high schools, and a Curator’s Day organised with Scottish Arts Council (Creative Scotland) with a highlight being a Q&A session between Dorothy Hogg (then head of Jewellery & Silversmithing, ECA) and Marie-José van den Hout (creator of Galerie Marzee). Altogether a truly memorable experience!

Nexus: Meetings at the Edge (2018, Kirkcaldy Galleries & Ruthin Craft Centre, Wales), curated by Dr Elizabeth Goring, in partnership with Ruthin Craft Centre, looked at contemporary artists working outside the traditional boundaries of their medium. In the spotlight were the fields of silversmithing, ceramics and textiles – but not as you’d expect to see them!

Read Part Two of Susan’s Fife Contemporary retrospective: Creative Opportunities for all

We are hiring!

Looking for a new challenge? Fancy joining our staff team?

Susan Davis, Fife Contemporary’s Programme Manager, is retiring from the post later this year after more than 35 years! Starting as a part-time Touring Exhibitions’ Officer in 1987, the role has changed and developed over the decades into a key part of Fife Contemporary’s staff team. To replace her post and expand on what she has achieved, we are looking for 2 people: a full-time Programme Manager, and a part-time Digital Design & Marketing Officer.

Programme Manager post

You will deliver our unique programme of exhibitions, artist residencies, off-site projects and touring ‘Craft Pods’, as well as education and outreach opportunities with new audiences.

With a passion for visual art and craft you will have experience of creative productive working relationships with artists, curators, community organisations and partner venues. Working closely with the Director, you will have the practical aptitude, planning and organisational ability, and positive attitude to be a linchpin for the organisation. You will be able to embody and embed our core values, promoting environmental responsibility and respect for equality, diversity and inclusion in everything that you do.

With the ability to communicate to a range of audiences, you will be working with venues across Fife and beyond, and be a key member of a close-knit and dedicated team at a small arts organisation which continues to punch above its weight.

Deadline for applications is Monday 6 June 2022 at 10am
Online interviews will take place on Thursday 16 June 2022

Digital Design & Marketing Officer

To succeed in this wide-ranging role, you will be a natural communicator with proven design skills and an interest, experience and knowledge of website development. You will have demonstrable social media skills and marketing experience and be able to successfully connect our programme to new digital audiences. You will be keen to lead on the delivery of a new and updated website and be able to produce exhibition print, marketing and graphic design and visual communications.

You will also have a passion for our mission to promote and produce the best art and craft exhibitions and experiences, and be able to embody and embed our core values, promoting environmental responsibility and respect for equality, diversity and inclusion in everything that you do.

Deadline for applications is Tuesday 14 June 2022 at 10am
Online interviews will be held on Wednesday 29 June 2022

If you have any questions regarding this role in advance of submitting an application, please contact susan.davis@fcac.co.uk.

Running to keep up with the tech

This is a sort of companion-piece to Diana’s first post back in May which looked at how the use of technology has changed our lives, particularly recently. From my point of view as a creator of various types of content, what it also highlighted was the amount of new learning it required. And that learning has had to be done fast!

Back at the beginning…

… things took longer. People’s expectations weren’t for warp speed when getting posters, preview cards, or basic publications ready for print. There was no internet (for most of us). Everything was typeset by hand with a photographer producing sized images and a glued-together mock-up used as a printer’s reference. In the late 1980s this was how non-hi-tech our set-up was at the Crawford Arts Centre. But by the mid-1990s we had one internet-enabled pc and I’d started to use Publisher to produce basic desktop-designed artwork for our print material.

Advent of higher-tech (for us)

I produced our first webpage (it wasn’t a website to be fair) in 1999, the same year as using Adobe’s Pagemaker software to design potter Thomas Lochhead‘s exhibition publication. Others were using QuarkXPress, but it was way too advanced & expensive for us. Fast forward a few years, and my usual choices for any design work is Adobe’s InDesign, Photoshop or Illustrator. Our website has also gone through various incarnations including a complete overall in 2014. Technology just doesn’t stand still.

And now?

That brings me back to the point at the start of this: the upsurge of digital content creation during the Covid-19 pandemic. I am no expert and to create the INSIGHTS to accompany Lines from Scotland meant a lot of Googling! How to edit or change video formats (when I didn’t have a suitable programme); how to edit audio; how to save iMovies when I’d run out of space on the iPad; how to even get the iMovies off the iPad! That’s the tip of the iceberg – I did a lot of online searching (Google is my friend)!

My conclusion?

There are usually many ways to skin a cat (so to speak)! For every way I found to sort a problem, there will be dozens of alternatives. The use of complex technology is with us now and it’s mainstream. It’s probably easier on the whole to embrace it and look for your own solutions. It opens up so many opportunities to connect with an audience, speak to people, find out what they’re doing. Digital and online content will not supplant a physical experience. It’s wonderful that so many cultural venues are starting to re-open, albeit in it pared down ways. But for an organisation, technology in its broadest sense is such a useful tool for communication, and we couldn’t be without it now.

If I can figure out the tech, I might just put a few, short ‘How tos’ together, in case I can save someone else the agony of frustration engendered by my own experience. I’ll let you know!