What we have decided (autumn/spring meetings):

Date/Venue: the Frame Workshop in St Nicholas Street has been booked by Malcolm for the month of April, 2011.

Costs: £100 booking fee will be paid by Freelance to secure the gallery space which includes a Private View, drinks and a poster all arranged by Frame Workshop. [Discussion by members of one or even two (!) P.V.s to avoid things getting overcrowded in the relatively small space - use of targeted mailings by Freelance members in addition to gallery publicity. Wednesday and/or Saturday for P.V.?]

Deadline: work for 'Discarded Made Beautiful' will need to be completed by the end of February, 2011. Frames Workshop organise the hanging, but we will offer a couple of people to assist.

Brief: "The test for us as members of Freelance is to do our very best work on something that is not important, is made out of throwaway materials, but which is beautiful." - Malcolm Moseley. Within this guiding brief we have firmed up the overall guidelines; these are intended to help us all to produce work of great variety, but which is relatively small in physical size. The A5 size is a good guideline, but something a bit bigger would be acceptable - as long as we don't go mad! It has to hang together as a show which encompasses a reasonably large number of such small, gem-like pieces of work. We are aiming at 50 to 60 works at the initial Private View. Selling off the wall on the night or in the month after would mean that we'd have to have some extra stock in hand. We mustn't get too hung up on the 'does it have to be my own rubbish exclusively?' type of question. The materials used should be those which are often discarded in society; nothing putrifying or smelly, mind. Either 2D or 3D is possible: wall-mounted, free standing, or even suspended (bearing in mind the limitations of the gallery).

Pricing: Maximum price per piece is £30; one third of this goes to the gallery.

The above notes come from a meeting discussion and one or two subsequent points. We are all used to working to some sort of brief and the limitations agreed are intended to give guidance and inspire. As with all our special projects, we are all being challenged to do something a bit different from our normal comfort zone activity. Please come along to meetings with objects, sketches, pieces of work in progress; please check the blog every now and then to see images of work (or potential work) which we upload - email Andrew or Borin any images you'd like to contribute. If you're stuck, the blog will help you to decide what you do or don't want to pursue. "Rubbish can be beautiful when it's mediated by the mind of an artist." Who said that? I think I just did.

January meeting: Mo, Angela & Hilli talked a little about the Freelance project 'Discarded Made Beautiful' & what it entailed. Angela thought the rules seemed a little restrictive but I said my understanding was that the guidelines were a starting point only & it was up to us to interpret. She said for example, must we only use our own rubbish? I'm sure when we start to see what others have produced it will make things clearer. The good thing about Freelance is that we produce such diverse work.

Hilli wants to create some glass pieces for our next show & is looking for small pieces of scrap glass if anyone has any, though she has to be careful as to its makeup as it can have different melting points & properties. She described a piece which she made which one day disintegrated into powder!