Introduction

Welcome to ‘The Tangled Hedgerow’. I’ll explain the name in a minute, but first, a kind of mission statement: the purpose of this blog is to document the work that I’m doing (and the fun that I’m having) as Fabrica’s development manager in developing the gallery’s digital footprint. I’m hoping that eventually, as it grows, the blog will become a resource for others, specifically other visual arts organisations. There’s a lot of digital/social media stuff out there to learn about and to do, lots of tools, a lot of it free and therefore very tempting but that’s just it, there’s a lot of it and a lot of it changes on an almost daily basis. So as much as I hope the blog will become a resource, I also hope it will become a focus for debate, for sharing ideas, successes and failures, and a place where others can also pass information on to me. I intend to be fully open about my ideas and those of the rest of the team here, and I encourage others to do the same. This stuff is all pretty new, and my guess is that as a sector we haven’t really started to make use of it beyond a limited marketing application. The opportunity exists to work together, and to think, debate, and play – above all play: there are no rules really, no established (n)etiquettes, and we have the opportunity be playful. We should always remember that – it’s not about tech, it’s about people.

I should probably own up right here to the fact that I’m no expert. I’m not an early adopter, not a geek, but once I started to look at all the possibilities and move beyond my initial marketing outlook on social media I started to get really excited, and I want to keep looking and keep exploring and to share that with anybody that thinks it might be worth coming along for the ride.

Just reading back through this I’ve made some assumptions in that you may not be my mother or somebody who works here, and you might not actually know the gallery or me.

Fabrica is a contemporary art gallery housed in a former Regency church in the heart of Brighton. It’s a place where artists come to make new work, and it supports and encourages the artists with whom it works to be adventurous and to test the boundaries of their practice. It encourages an open dialogue between artists and visitors within the gallery space and produces an integrated programme of education and audience development activity that strives to remove barriers to access, engagement and understanding. And yes, I did just lift that straight from our website.

My role at Fabrica is development manager, which covers a number of areas: audience, business and venue development; marketing; sponsorship and individual giving; and, you know, other things too that just need doing, as in all small arts organisations, I guess. I started working here in 2004 as a volunteer.

I could go on and on in this introduction about my emerging philosophy on the use of social media and other tools for arts organisations, but I’m thinking that maybe I should just let that emerge in later posts rather than make this an essay. I’ll round this entry off by explaining the blog’s name.

When the idea of the blog first came up I spent a lot of time thinking about a name for it; I roped in Matthew Miller, one of Fabrica’s co-directors, who’s renowned for his ability to come up with great titles. There were large pieces of paper covered in scribbles involved, scratching of heads, chewing of pencils and other cartoon depictions of deep thought, but the light-bulb moment didn’t happen and no name was forthcoming. Trying to sum up the purpose of the blog practically or conceptually in its name just wasn’t working – it was too complex. Finally I began to think that something random might be a better solution and, sitting on a train one day, the idea popped into my head: ‘The Tangled Hedgerow’. I liked it; it seemed admirably random and the more I thought about it the more right it felt. A hedgerow between two fields is like the space in a Venn diagram where the circles overlap, and that’s pretty much how I conceptualise the digital world in relation to an organisation, Fabrica in this case. There’s us and there’s the rest of the world, and there’s a space in the digital world where we can overlap and where interesting things can happen. Both sides can put things into that space and take things out, but the space also allows unique things to grow and prosper that can’t exist outside it. All things that are true of a hedgerow. The name also references Darwin’s ‘tangled bank’ theory of evolution, and I liked that and the idea of the gallery evolving in a new world and also trying to make sense of a complex and changing environment. So I give you (at length) ‘The Tangled Hedgerow’.

Finally, the important stuff - you can follow us on

Twitter
Facebook

Check out our website

You can also follow me on Twitter @laurencehill