Since October last year, I’ve been involved with the launch of an artists’ collective. We are six women artists and we call ourselves Splynta, signifying something a bit spiky, under the skin and breaking away. The idea of the collective evolved during our second year on the part-time MA Fine Art at UCA, Farnham. The six of us got on, had worked closely together during the course, and wanted to set up a support network for the future. We started our activities by making work in response to a common theme, Under the Surface.
The six of us work with different processes and methods but are all committed to a research-based practice. We worked separately, but then came together in one of our studios for group discussions and crits which helped to establish the body of work. The outcomes for Under the Surface included sculpture, photography, painting and book objects. Rather than put together a physical show of the work, we created an online zine with it. Once we had designed a logo for the group, we built the zine in Adobe InDesign and published it on Yumpu. There is a brief introduction to the group followed by a double page spread of text and images for each artist. Click on the link below to view it.
Once the zine was online the next job was to get it seen. An Instagram account was the next move, with a link to the zine in the bio. We took turns to post our own zine pages, one a day, over the first week, then embarked on a series of artists’ takeovers of the account over subsequent weeks. For these we set a series of questions that we all had to answer. That gave the takeovers a structure and set up a dialogue between us and others. By pooling contacts we’ve begun to build up followers.
As well as the group crits, we have made outings to see exhibitions and have a Whatsapp group where we can share information and opportunities that we see listed. We have also begun another body of work stemming from responses to a piece by one of our members whose name was picked randomly out of a hat. This new body of work, known as ‘House’, forms our current proposal to galleries. We are gaining experience with every application we make, and being a collective, it seems easier to encourage ourselves to keep going in the face of the rejections that every artist is up against.
Liz Clifford 