The Bunbury Regional Art Gallery has been invited to partner with 39 other art organisations across WA in a bid to create connection and strength across the industry in a new project – The Creative Grid.
The project aims to put an end to the ‘silo’ approach of arts administration, and will bring artists, galleries and arts organisations throughout WA out of isolation to share resources and funding and work together to create and tour exhibitions and new projects.
The Creative Grid project coordinator Fiona Sinclair said it would address the needs of the visual arts sector as a whole.
“The project would be bereft if the Bunbury Regional Art Gallery wasn’t part of it because they’re really at the pinnacle of what is possible within the State, so it’s great to have their support and participation,” she said.
“In Bunbury what we are looking at doing is offering some exhibitions – a solo exhibition for an emerging artist to put on a first time show and a group exhibition, which will link up to 15 others happening across the state roughly at the same time and they will all respond to the same theme.
“So that’s a really exciting opportunity for artists to respond to a proper curatorial brief, a lot of the time they’ve never had the opportunity, so it challenges them to think about their creative practise in a different way.”
Bunbury Regional Art Gallery director Julian Bowron said it was an innovative way of working across the sector and it would be great to see and hear what came out of it.
“We’re the biggest gallery in the state and we’ve worked with Fiona for a long time so it made sense to be part of this,” he said.
“I think we have an obligation to contribute to the sector, to what’s going on in our region and this is a very obvious we can do that – it’s going to be fun being apart of this big adventure.”
Ms Sinclair said that whilst jobs and skills enhancement were important benefits of the project the greatest goal was to build social capital.
“The projects we are creating are very much regionally driven and not coming out of the city – it is about country people saying this is what we are really interested in,” she said.
“It is about regional WA taking the reins and driving a different future for the arts.”