Organising, Art Collectives, and Exhibitions in Small Communities
Organising and curating an art exhibition is far more complicated than I’d imagined.
I’m currently organising an exhibition in Guernsey of the work of Split Collective. Split is a group of around 70 artists who met last year on the Turps Correspondence Course (CC) when we put on a travelling exhibition. This moved from Wrexham to Wigan and then down to London in June 2025. Our members are mainly based in the UK and Ireland, but include artists from Sweden, the US, Holland, Vietnam and Romania/Britain.
Forty-four painters and sculptors are involved in the Guernsey show. Others from the Collective are busy with projects which are taking place at the same time. We have another exhibition planned in November at the City Assembly House, Dublin which more of us will be involved with.
Prior to this year, although I knew it was big, I had no real conception of the amount of work that Michael (our main organiser last year) had to do in the background in preparing for the shows. I now realise! That said, all the artists participating in the Guernsey show been so helpful and quick to respond in our many WhatsApp conversations while my ADHD head is whirling madly. Offers of help have been widespread, showing the true value of collective working. I’ve found that the only way of coping organising this alongside a very busy job and my own painting practice, is to write endless lists on my iPhone, and to decompress now and again with a very cold swim (the sea here is around 11° at the moment) which seems to calm and slow down my overactive brain!
We all have different strengths and work to these. Prior to this experience, I have never had to think before about international shipping and handling of art, customs forms, curation, large group dynamics, and the sheer amount of organisation and communication involved in big group exhibitions. Many of our members have pitched in to help put together and proofread the catalogue, arrange the transport of work from around England and Wales and act as drop off and pick up points for the work. Others are coming over early to help hang the show. I’ve never known such a flurry of WhatsApp messages late to the night, but we are certainly getting to know each other a lot better through this process, which I’m hoping will end well!
Artists’ collectives feel really valuable within the current art ecosystem at a time when the world feels somewhat precarious. As far as I have experienced, they seem to value art as a relational and communal endeavour, alongside the rather isolated act of making art alone much of the time. They encourage the conditions for sustained dialogue —spaces where discourse, risk-taking, and collective reflection can unfold outside the dominant logics of individual authorship and market validation. In doing so, they are able to act as sites of care and resilience, enabling artists to share resources, labour and visibility, while sustaining practices that might otherwise remain fragile or unseen.
From the standpoint of someone who is unable to show work often in the UK, an important aspect of Split Collective lies in our capacity to collectively resource shows at sites that would be unaffordable for us to show work in as individuals. We are able to privilege process over product when we chose to, work within specific social contexts, and remain attuned to the urgencies of the moment. We are also able to reach audiences that are used to more traditional or amateur exhibitions, and in doing so provide alternative models of what art can be. Whether or not that will be well received by the Guernsey public is yet to be seen!
An interesting experiment we carried out this week, about a month before the show opens, was the idea from one of the members to run our artists statements for the catalogue through AI. This was to provide consistency of presentation, alphabetise and save time.
The prompts used for this were:
Take each artist statement and change it to first person
Condense each artist statement to 300 words or less
Make sure to retain artists’ voice and not remove important artistic influences
Remove address details but keep each artist’s name
Put the list in alphabetical order
The outcome was fascinating. One artist said “my bio read much more smoothly - it made my original look crap - but eerie too...and somewhat incorrect. You could see how it could gently lead you to a place where you are not (if you know what I mean). I've unsmoothed it a tad.” Another disliked it saying, “Personally, the grammar is less important than the voice. So [while my statement] may not be ‘great writing’ … it took ages and was developed over months/years to feel ‘true’ to something very hard to put into words and is still moving. I use Chat GPT for lots of things, but this is so personal.” Like me, she found it a great exercise to try, but it made her aware of how important writing is to her. Our collective member who carried out the AI exercise said “Personally I didn't find it very far removed from my original and I only had to remove one em dash and change a word. … I think AI is one of those tools, like so much with technology, we just need to use mindfully. Social media like Instagram is so prevalent now people don't really question the algorithm or why they put work on there.” After sharing the revised statements, the artists were asked to check them, amend or revert to their original version. It will be interesting to see how many of us will use the AI statements, their original ones or a hybrid of the two.
My friends in Guernsey who are providing the venues for the show have also been fantastic and generous with their time, money and input. Adam Stephens, the director of the Gate House Gallery, is currently sourcing plinths for the sculptures and writing a foreword for the catalogue. Adrian Datta of St Peter’s Rectory will be taking his van over to Portsmouth on the ferry to pick up the work, bringing it back to Guernsey the next day. He and his wife Myfanwy are developing a community art project in their beautiful home in the valley below St Pierre du Bois church where he is the rector. He is also a practising psychologist who has a passion for art. He understands art, not as a commodity or market asset, but as a fundamentally human process—one that forges and strengthens communal bonds, creates spaces for empathy and reflection, and helps us make sense of the world we inhabit.
About 15 of the artists are visiting the Islands for the private view weekend. We are really looking forward to meeting up, sharing meals together and talking art. Some of us are doing Turps CC again this year. Others have finished or are doing the Turps residency courses, but we have all found the CC a brilliant way of making friends and connections, particularly those of us who live in remote areas.
I am hoping that the exhibition will create meaningful connections between the visiting artists and those in the Channel Islands. It will hopefully also offer our audiences direct engagement with current artistic thinking. For practitioners and local art students alike, we hope that the exhibition will work as a site of reflection and encounter, opening up new perspectives, conversations and a sense of belonging for us small islanders, to an expanded creative community.