Scribbling And Sponsorship

I don’t work alone in my garret (I don’t have a garret), I like to work with other artists to develop exhibitions and projects. I’ve been a member of an artist collective called Commensalis for about a year now and our aim is to get our work out into the world because art is meant to be seen. But it costs quite a bit to do that and we don’t have any public funding.

So we’ve decided to try out crowdfunding for our next show, in Bath, UK in July. There are five of us in Commensalis and none of us has done anything like this before, we’re learning as we go along. It’s an interesting way to get sponsorship. People pledge whatever they want and in return get a reward. It’s a lot of work to put a site together though, especially with five of us, collating information and images, making a ‘video’ and writing up some blurb without sounding like a bunch of arty pseuds. And also deciding on what rewards to give and then making them. Not as easy as it seemed at first. We’re nearly there though and hope to go live with our site on March 30th.

These are my Scribblecats. They’re tiny direct-line monotypes onto archival-quality tissue, cut and mounted onto hand-made papers. They’re based on little sketches I made some years ago of two brother cats we had, the late, great Ffred and Sialco (pronounced Shalko). They were both semi-long-haired whites but Ffred was easily the most evil cat that has ever roamed the planet, and completely manky as well. Sialco on the other hand (paw?) was delicate, refined and gracious and always beautifully groomed. I’m doing 25 of these little monotypes for our crowdsourcing site.

PS our sponsorship site is now live and Scribblecats are offering themselves as rewards for our backers 😀