Let It Go ...

The exhibition itself is brilliant; but there's a couple of things that particularly impressed me about the whole project:

1) Letting go: The underlying ethos of this project is to invite discussion and involvement from the public - including workshops and a roll-out that will allow other people (gasp!) to take it and run with it. I had a chat with lead artist Sandra Hall (also of Friction Arts) who happily stated that she was hoping to take a step back from the project - which struck me as a remarkable attitude. Artists and arts organisations can be precious about their product (cue: barrage of abuse from arts orgs and artists) but clinging onto your 'baby' means, often, that it can't be 'adopted' by others. This project will change, it will get messed around with, it will be interpreted, misinterpreted and re-interpreted totally differently by hundreds of different people. Because that's human nature. And that's exciting.

2) Not the usual 'art crowd'. Two thirds of people attending the opening night weren't in any way connected to the arts - again, there was a sense of ownership from the public, not some artistic elite. Hundreds of 'normal' people committed to attending the exhibition through Facebook invitation and have already got involved with the Heard and not Seen website/blog and posted their own stories on - funnily enough - the 'Stories' page.

There's really so much to this project that my piddling little blog post can't really do it justice. Please check out heardandnotseen.com. Really, check it out. Go! Get off my blog! Geez ....