Evolver 117 - September and October 2020

LOCKDOWN 2020 6 DRAWING PROJECTS, run by Anita Taylor in Trowbridge, has been a hub for drawing exhibitions, poetry events and the Friday Breakfast Club, which hosts talks by women who are leaders in their field. She thinks: “Friday Club will probably migrate to Zoom, which will allow people who live further away to access it remotely but will probably lose that immediacy of direct to-ing and fro-ing of ideas and opinions”. Anita is also Dean of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design at the University of Dundee so has been doing both jobs from her base in Trowbridge. As a practicing artist she was planning to make ambitious work in her studio using time syphoned off from her considerable travelling commitments. However as she laughingly acknowledged: “It hasn’t quite worked out like that”. As with so many organisations she has been forced into rethinking what direction Drawing Projects should go in. They are hoping to reopen with one of the cancelled exhibitions in the autumn, initially by appointment. A significant casualty of the pandemic has been the scrapping of THE PADDOCK PROJECT in Sherborne. Plans for a multi- million pound state of the art visual and performing arts centre had been designed by LCH Architectural practice and approved by Dorset Council in June 2019. At the beginning of the lockdown Sherborne Arts Trust announced that the Covid-19 crisis had significantly affected the project’s funding so the project would not be going ahead. Community arts projects and art weeks, which depend on artists opening their own spaces, have also suffered catastrophically and many of them have fragile finances. DORSET ART WEEKS has rescheduled for May 2021 and most of their artists have carried over their subscriptions to next year. However, as Dorset Visual Arts Creative Director Jem Main acknowledged, the organisation will need to rethink how it proceeds and look at all options. Both SOMERSET and DEVON OPEN STUDIOS are going ahead, promoting their events through digital catalogues. One of the most significant changes to come about in this period of realignment for galleries and other arts venues is the move to working digitally. It means less travelling and the possibility of expanding their reach because people can participate regardless of their location. Digital news and promotion facilitates rapid changes to programmes, which is essential during this period of uncertainty. It does however come with the caveat of digital fatigue. With so much content online it is sometimes daunting to know where to start. Theatres and concert halls have been massively hit by the closures imposed by Covid-19. Performances have been cancelled, and without audiences or income the way forward is very uncertain. How these venues function with the restrictions imposed by social distancing is going to be very problematic. Some performances are moving outside for the summer but theatres are already starting to lay off staff. ST GEORGES in Bristol has already staged concerts outdoors with bass clefs sprayed on the grass to indicate social distances. These short-term solutions are giving venues a breathing space whilst they work out how to operate once the weather gets colder. Despite the very gloomy predictions in the Government report for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport that ‘93% of grassroots venues say they face permanent closure, with 70% of theatres and production companies at risk of going out of business by the end of this year’, Mick Smith at BRIDPORT ARTS CENTRE is both sanguine and positive about the future. Last year they had to make some very painful decisions in order to save the arts centre, but it meant that they were in a much better position when the lockdown hit. They had already sold the building, reduced staff and recalibrated their projections for income. The success of the high profile Bridport Prize attracting 12,500 entries from 82 countries this year also helped financially. In September they will be staging an outdoor theatre performance Gnora the Gnome’s Daytime Disco on Millennium Green and in the Autumn they will experiment with shorter pop- up type exhibitions in the gallery. Once it becomes clearer that indoor theatre events are viable they will be hoping, using clustered seating for couples and family groups, to host around eighty people for productions in the theatre space. ‘TOGETHER / APART’’ (That Art Gallery, Bristol)