HI-Arts - Visual Arts Marketing Project Report (2002)

[ HI~ARTS ] Visual Arts Marketing Project Final Report

[ Marcus Wilson ] [ Highlands & Islands Visual Arts Marketing Co-ordinator ] [ July 2002 ] [ Final Version ]

Contents Section One: [ Introduction ] Part One: [ Project Background ] Part Two: [ The Report ]

Section Two: [ Overview ] Part One: [ The Highlands & Islands ] Part Two: [ Visual Arts Provision ] Part Three: [ Visual Arts Market ] Part Four: [ Arts Marketing Practices ]

Section Three: [ Audience Development - Not-for-Profit Sector ] Part One: [ Accessibility ] Part Five: [ Advocacy ] Part Two: [ Programming ]

Part Six: [ Retail & Catering ]

Part Three: [ Education ]

Part Seven: [ Research & Monitoring ]

Part Four: [ The Marketing Mix ]

Section Four: [ Visual Arts Practitioners ] Part One: [ Sector Size & Characteristics ] Part Two: [ Relationship with Public Galleries ] Part Three: [ Support Mechanisms ]

Section Five: [ Sector Development ] Part One: [ Profile ] Part Two: [ The Bigger Picture ]

Section Six: [ Executive Summary ] Part One: [ Conclusions ] Part Two: [ Exit Strategy ]

Section Seven: [ Appendices ] Part One: [ Reference & Related Reading ] Part Two: [ Credits ] Front Cover Image: Photograph (Loch Glencoul, Sutherland) by Colin Simpson, with detail from ‘Ladhar Beinn’ painting by James Hawkins.

Inset: ‘Art.tm’ Interior (Inverness), ‘Taigh Chearsabhagh’ Exterior (North Uist)

S e c t i o n

O n e :

[ Introduction ] This report is the outcome of a two year Visual Arts Marketing Project conducted throughout the Highlands and Islands of Scotland between July 2000 and July 2002.

The project was supported by the Scottish Arts Council Lottery Fund, Highlands and Islands Enterprise and HI~Arts.

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[ Section 1- Introduction ]

Part One: [ Project Background ] The Visual Arts Marketing Project was conceived in 1999 by the Highlands and Islands Visual Arts Consortium – a group representing each of the visual arts centres across the region in receipt of Scottish Arts Council funding. At meetings of this consortium, facilitated by HI~Arts, participants discussed the shared challenges of visual arts development in a Highlands and Islands context, and explored cross-sector, collaborative initiatives to address these challenges.

Through these meetings, it was decided that marketing practices had been under-resourced and under-developed within consortium organisations, and more generally across the visual arts sector of the region. This was felt to have an impact on: •

awareness of visual arts facilities in their immediate communities

•

wider recognition (generating national press coverage and attracting visiting audiences)

•

levels of sales (both for commercial and not-for-profit facilities)

As a result, marketing was adopted as a developmental priority for the consortium, and an ambitious and cooperative approach to marketing development was initiated. It was decided that an arts marketing expert should be appointed to give practical help and advice on the establishment and implementation of marketing strategies for each consortium member, whilst responding to these broader marketing challenges.

To ensure that these strategies would be relevant to the distinctive communities in which each consortium organisation worked, it was agreed that a peripatetic post holder should work within each organisation for a period of two to three months, in a series of residencies. The post holder would perform local market research, analyse marketing practices, deliver marketing training to staff, and prepare marketing plans which could then be implemented by each host organisation. In a broader sense, the post holder would act as an advocate for good marketing practice across the visual arts sector, also providing advice for individual practitioners, commercial galleries and private artists’ studios, and develop more practical cross-sector promotional initiatives.

In July 2000, a Visual Arts Marketing Coordinator for the region was appointed who, over the next two years, undertook nine residencies at visual arts centres across the Highlands and Islands, from the Shetland Isles in the north to the Isle of Mull in the south.

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[ Section 1- Introduction ]

Participating Organisations The nine organisations participating directly in marketing residencies were art.tm (Inverness), Pier Arts Centre (Stromness, Orkney Isles), An Tobar (Tobermory, Isle of Mull), An Tuireann Arts Centre (Portree, Isle of Skye), Taigh Chearsabhagh (Lochmaddy, Isle of North Uist), An Lanntair Arts Centre (Stornoway, Isle of Lewis), Bonhoga Gallery (Weisdale, Shetland Isles), Timespan Heritage Centre and Gallery (Helmsdale, Sutherland) and the Highland Council Exhibition Service, which programmes galleries in Wick, Thurso, Inverness and Kingussie.

Common to all participating venues is their ‘not-for-profit’ status and the receipt of funding from the Scottish Arts Council – either through capital Lottery funds, revenue funding or the financial support of exhibition programmes or visual arts projects.

The remit of these not-for-profit organisations is seen to differ from that of the commercial sector galleries in a number of ways. Whilst the bottom line for private galleries is the generation of a profit from the sale of artwork, public galleries, by virtue of this public funding, have a much broader mission including education, development of visual arts audiences and artform development, and are more publicly accountable.

A number of venues participating in the project house shared facilities alongside their galleries.

This maximises local access to centres in rural areas, and offers a more diverse product to visiting audiences. For instance, Timespan is home to a large museum as well as a gallery, An Tobar and An Lanntair are also popular performance venues, and the Highland Council’s Caithness galleries are both situated within local libraries. Taigh Chearsabhagh, whilst offering museum and gallery facilities, has also become home to Lochmaddy’s local Post Office and a venue for the delivery of Lews Castle College’s ‘Art and Design’ courses.

Visual Arts Marketing Residencies

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[ Section 1- Introduction ]

Additional funding for these organisations comes from a variety of different sources depending on the location of centres and the dual roles that many undertake. Local Councils, Local Enterprise Companies and Trust funds have all been important sources of revenue for these organisations. However, all of these funding sources carry different, and sometimes contradictory, obligations.

Retail and catering operations are also important ways of generating revenue and developing audiences for many of these centres, and all of this adds to the uniqueness of each organisation participating in the project.

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[ Section 1- Introduction ]

Part Two: [ The R ep or t ]

Content Like the Visual Arts Marketing Project, this report concentrates primarily on audience and sales development practices as they relate to the not-for-profit visual arts sector. By highlighting successful marketing practices witnessed at the organisations participating in the project, it is hoped that relevant models of audience development may be shared across the not-for-profit sector locally, or used to inform the practices of organisations working in a similarly rural context in other areas.

The report also makes reference to the context in which these organisations work, and their relation and positioning in regard to both private sector galleries and individual visual arts practitioners. Section Four of the report goes on to explore the development of visual artists’ promotional practices across the sector, and Section Five considers the current, and the potential for future, marketing collaborations across both the public and private sectors.

Finally, the report makes recommendations for an exit strategy for the marketing project, alongside the organisations and agencies that should take on the responsibility for each aspect of its implementation.

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[ Section 1- Introduction ]

Methodology The research used to inform this report was gathered during the two years of the Visual Arts Marketing Project. Numerous methods were used for the collection of this data, the main sources being: •

Interviews carried out with staff, key funders and stakeholders of all organisations participating in the project.

•

Interviews with directors and staff of private galleries across the region.

•

Interviews with regional Council Arts Development Officers.

•

Interviews with visual arts education providers across the region.

•

Audience research carried out for each participating organisation, through in-house self-completion questionnaires, mail surveys, focus groups and mystery shopping.

•

Research with non-attending target audiences, through focus groups held in Inverness and on Skye.

•

Marketing surgeries and interviews with over 50 individual visual arts practitioners across the region.

•

Results of reader evaluation forms from the Highlands and Islands Visual Arts Guide (1999-2002).

•

Information gathered from two major Highlands and Islands Visual Arts Fora in November 2000 and January 2002, with a combined attendance of over 120 visual arts practitioners and administrators.

•

Liaison with research staff of Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, on rural visual arts and audience development research projects.

•

Secondary research sources, including census results and local tourist board research material.

A comprehensive list of texts used to inform the project, along with recommended further reading, is available within the appendices of this report.

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S e c t i o n

T w o :

[ Overview ] This section provides a brief introduction to the Highlands and Islands region, its visual arts provision and key visual arts markets. It also explores broader arts marketing practices within the region.

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[ Section 2 – Overview ]

Part One: [ T h e Highlands & Islands ]

The Highlands and Islands region stretches some 640 kilometres from the Shetland Isles in the north, to the southern tip of Argyll. The region has a total land area of over 39,000 square kilometres.

However, with a population of 373,000, the Highlands and Islands is one of the most sparsely populated parts of the European Union, with a population density of just 9 persons per square kilometre, compared to an EU average of 116 per square kilometre.

The inner Moray Firth area contains nearly 20% of the region’s population, and the two largest conurbations in the area are Inverness and Fort William, with populations of 40,000 and 11,500 respectively. Over 60% of the region’s residents live in rural areas or settlements of fewer than 5,000 people, and whilst Inverness remains one of the fastestgrowing cities in Europe, many of the most sparsely populated communities within the region are still suffering from out-migration.

The people and heritage of the modern Highlands and Islands have been influenced by many different cultures over the last 2,000 years. In the Northern Isles (Shetland and Orkney), the influence of Norse ancestors is still evident in the buildings, arts, crafts and local dialect, whereas the Gaelic culture and language is still evident throughout much of the mainland Highlands, and is strong in the Western Isles.

The service sector accounts for over two thirds of employment in the region, and is characterised by the importance of public administration and tourism. Tourism itself currently accounts for around 4.8 million visits to the Highlands and Islands each year, which breaks down into 4.3 million UK visitors and 0.5 million overseas visitors*.

*VisitScotland figures for year 2000.

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[ Section 2 – Overview ]

Part Two: [ V isu al Art s Pr ov is i on ]

Not-for-profit sector The Highlands and Islands is an area with no particular indigenous visual arts tradition or history of gallery-going. That is to say, whilst the area has been extensively plundered for subject matter by visiting artists over the last two centuries, no native visual arts tradition has existed. Only in Orkney, which has the longest-established purpose-built public gallery in the Highlands and Islands, do we have an example of an area in which one whole generation of a community has grown up with access to a public visual arts facility.

The Pier Arts Centre opened in 1979 as the result of the donation of an important collection of twentieth century art, including work by Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. Donated by Margaret Gardiner, the centre’s permanent collection was gifted to the centre, not for its depiction of Orkney or the involvement of Orcadian artists, but for the parallels between the landscape of Orkney and that of St. Ives, from which much of the work took its inspiration. The influence of this well-established provision is now clear to see, with Orkney supporting more private sector galleries and artists studios than any other region in the Highlands and Islands.

Other public galleries followed later. The Highland Council’s Libraries and Leisure Services opened small galleries within Wick Library in 1983 (St. Fergus Gallery) and Thurso Library in 1984 (Swanson Gallery), these towns being the largest population centres north of Inverness with comparatively cosmopolitan populations due to the siting of Dounreay nuclear plant and an American communications base in the area.

The Highland Council Exhibition Service was set up in 1991 to originate exhibitions to tour the circuit of Council galleries and other temporary Highland venues, curating, amongst other shows, the highly-successful Highland Myth and Symbol exhibition (1991), which included many now well-known Highland artists. The 1990s saw another two Council galleries join this touring circuit – the Iona Gallery was established alongside the Highland Folk Museum in Kingussie, and Inverness Museum and Gallery was added to the circuit in 1996.

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[ Section 2 – Overview ]

An Lanntair Arts Centre opened in 1986 in central Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis with its own critically-acclaimed exhibition ‘From the Land’, which marked the centenary of the Crofting Act and went on to tour Canada in 1989 and 1990.

During the mid to late 1990s, public visual arts provision was significantly increased, mainly thanks to Scottish Arts Council National Lottery funding. A number of purposebuilt, contemporary gallery spaces sprang up out of more modest local arts facilities, including art.tm (formely Highland Printmakers, Inverness) and An Tuireann (Isle of Skye), both of which, like Pier Arts Centre and An Lanntair, are now core-funded by the Scottish Arts Council.

In addition, a purpose-built public gallery space was added to the Timespan Heritage Centre in East Sutherland at this time, and the Shetland Arts Trust established Bonhoga Gallery in a former mill building on the rural West Side of Shetland.

Taigh Chearsabhagh (North Uist) and An Tobar (Isle of Mull) also opened at this time, both the result of community-led efforts to secure arts and heritage facilities for their respective areas.

It can be seen, therefore, that the visual arts are in their infancy in the Highlands and Islands, and this is the context in which these organisations now operate.

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[ Section 2 – Overview ]

Commercial sector The visual art of the Highlands and Islands is a growing sector, as can be seen from the Highlands and Islands Visual Arts Guide. In the first edition of this publication, in 1999, the guide contained 92 entries for visual arts organisations in the region. In the subsequent edition, published in 2001, this number had risen to 128. Whilst some of these smaller organisations were simply overlooked at the time of the first guide, the majority had opened in the two years since the initial publication.

It is estimated that if the Guide were published today, it would contain more than 140 entries, including two recent major gallery developments in central Inverness - the Castle Gallery and Studio Gallery.

Numerous ‘micro-businesses’ that make up the visual arts sector of the area account for the sector’s current sustainability, and in instances where galleries have closed, a number have usually sprung up to take their place.

The Visual Arts Guide itself contains an even balance of both individual artists’ studio spaces, and small commercial galleries exhibiting a range of primarily local artists’ work.

The region’s highest profile commercial galleries specialising in local contemporary work include Brown’s Gallery (Tain), Kilmorack Gallery (Beauly), Castle Gallery (Inverness) and Kranenburg and Fowler Fine Arts (Oban), and these galleries have represented local artists at national art fairs on occasion.

The Orkney Isles and the Isle of Skye are the two areas best-served by galleries and artists’ studios, with approximately one gallery per 1,000 residents, which also reflects the high levels of tourism in these areas that help to sustain this level of provision. The most populated areas of the Highlands around Inverness and Nairn are the worst served, with just one gallery per 8,000 residents.

The value of the visual arts sector to the region is hard to estimate, but is currently thought to be in the region of £2.5 million per year. The region’s galleries are thought to sustain around 60 full-time equivalent jobs in addition to the numerous local visual artists whose practice they support.

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[ Section 2 – Overview ]

Part Three: [ V is ual Ar ts Mar ket ] The 128 visual arts organisations represented in the Highlands and Islands Visual Arts Guide 2001-2002 are currently estimated to attract around 600,000 visits per year between them.

Of these, the public sector galleries represented in the Visual Arts Marketing Project receive a total of 160,000 visits annually (around one quarter of the total for the sector).

These figures underestimate the volume of attendance generated across the sector. Many other venues and open access studios are used for exhibitions by local artist associations, individual practioners and visual arts organisations on a seasonal basis to access local audiences and markets across the region, none of which are represented in the above statistics.

Tourist Audiences An estimated two-thirds of these annual visits to galleries (approximately 400,000) are made by tourists. This demonstrates the importance attached to reaching this transient audience sector by the visual arts sector.

Visitors to the Highlands and Islands come from comparatively high socio-economic groupings. 70% of UK visitors, and over 80% of overseas visitors, are from the ABC1 socio-economic groups – groups which are most likely to take an interest in gallery-going and arts purchasing.

In addition, whilst tourism to the region has declined since the mid-nineties, the profile of visitors that do visit has shifted to include more ‘cultural tourists’ with an interest in enrichment rather than escapism, who are more inclined towards the visual arts.

Tourist visitors to the Highlands and Islands are also inclined to return to the region.

Indeed, over two-thirds of the region’s visitors are on return trips, and nearly 40% of tourists have been on four or more previous visits to the area*. Therefore, nothing is wasted in trying to develop tourist audiences for the arts of the region.

Visitors to the region place an emphasis on the purchase of work by local artists and of artwork that is reminiscent of their visit (primarily landscapes). *Statistics provided by the Highlands of Scotland Tourist Board.

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[ Section 2 – Overview ]

Local Audiences As with gallery attendance, there is little tradition of original artwork purchases in the Highlands and Islands, especially from indigenous populations, and encouraging accessibility to, and a culture of, the purchase of artwork must remain a high priority.

However, many commercial sector galleries also have access to a small but important customer base of relatively wealthy individuals who have made their second home in the Highlands and Islands, and who often come from areas with a greater culture of visual arts purchasing.

Due to the rural locations (and often island locations) of the public galleries participating in the project, many have extremely small local catchment populations. For example, An Tobar on Mull serves an island community of less than 3,000 people. However, the centre’s local audiences account for over 4,000 visits to the centre per year.

Similarly, from a dispersed community of around 6,000 people on the Uists in the Western Isles, Taigh Chearsabhagh receive over 10,000 visits from local audiences annually.

Therefore, whilst audience figures may seem low in comparison to urban centres, the market penetration of these rural visual arts organisations can often eclipse that of their urban counterparts, and is often a product of the centres’ dual or triple functions.

Given their small local catchment populations and the underdevelopment of a gallery-going tradition, the public galleries cannot afford to concentrate on ‘niche audiences’ for their programme of contemporary arts. Neither do the Highlands and Islands have access to significant numbers of specialist visual arts students, such as the 600 students of Gray’s School of Art that can help to bolster attendance at the contemporary exhibitions of Aberdeen.

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[ Section 2 – Overview ]

Part Four: [ Mar ket ing Pr act ices ] It is generally acknowledged that the marketing practices of the visual arts are less developed than those of the performing arts. Whereas theatres and performance venues have taken a more fundamentally customer-led approach to programming and marketing that is sensitive to local communities, similar not-for-profit visual arts facilities can struggle with a product-led approach, which often assumes that the inherent value of the (contemporary) visual arts is a universally-accepted truth. This is particularly dangerous in areas such as the Highlands and Islands, where there is little or no tradition of gallerygoing.

The broad arts sector of the Highlands and Islands is characterised by a multitude of medium and small scale organisations, with an emphasis on effort at grassroots and voluntary level, and whilst there are examples of good marketing practice across the area, it is only a few performance venues that are of a scale to sustain arts marketing expertise within their core staffing structures (including Inverness’s Eden Court Theatre and Portree’s Aros Centre). Therefore, whilst visual arts organisations in other parts of the UK have been able to take a lead from the more developed marketing practices of the performing arts, this has not been the case in more rural areas.

Great potential exists for economies of scale through collaborative regional approaches to arts marketing across the region’s numerous small to medium scale arts venues and organisations. However, this has not yet been realised, mainly due to the absence of marketing personnel to coordinate and deliver such projects.

On the other hand, examples of good practice in direct relationship marketing to key target audiences exist within many of the centres participating in the marketing project, often closely integrated with the delivery of specific projects and exhibitions. Some of these will be explored later in this report.

However, overall marketing and campaign planning within these centres is often informal and undertaken on an ad-hoc basis, which is mainly a result of intensive workloads in delivering a visual arts service and the lack of dedicated marketing staff or structures.

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[ Section 2 – Overview ]

Audience Development Post The demonstrated need for marketing development and coordination across all artforms in the region has led to the establishment of an Audience Development project post based within HI~Arts. Whilst being a cross-art form initiative, this post will take responsibility for the implementation of a number of this report’s recommendations and, as a result, is one of the key exit strategies for the Visual Arts Marketing Project.

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S e c t i o n

T h r e e :

[ Audience Development – Not-for-profit Sector ] This section explores current audience development practices within the organisations involved in the Visual Arts Marketing Project, whilst highlighting models of good practice. It also makes recommendations as to where marketing practices could be improved and where scope for greater collaboration between participating galleries exists.

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[ Section 3 – Audience Development ]

Part One: [ A c ce s s i b il i t y ] Given the absence of a gallery-going tradition in the Highlands and Islands, it is important to establish what barriers exist to access and participation across the region’s galleries.

During the course of the project, a number of focus groups and localised interviews were conducted to explore these barriers. Focus groups were made up of people who were not current attenders at public galleries, but described themselves as being interested in the arts, and were therefore representative of key target audiences for the public galleries.

One of the main barriers to attendance for local audiences appears to be perceptions of the ‘difficulty’ associated with contemporary visual arts and their irrelevance to the rural Highlands and Islands. Some considered the contemporary visual arts to be a ‘city thing’.

There were also perceptions of the exclusivity of the galleries themselves in terms of the way in which the galleries communicate, or fail to communicate, with the public, and the physical barriers thrown up by the gallery buildings.

Finally, some people also admitted to a lack of confidence in approaching the visual arts or a discomfort in entering unfamiliar gallery spaces, feeling that they ought to have a sound knowledge of the visual arts or the ‘etiquette’ of gallery-going before even crossing the threshold. This is a concept that has been referred to as a lack of ‘cultural capital’.

Indeed, the design and layout of some contemporary galleries’ reception areas can be somewhat sparse and confrontational. The most successful venues in terms of breaking down barriers to access have been those that have created an environment that is more welcoming and familiar to the experiences of local audiences.

In some cases, the ‘shop front’ of galleries can be overly reticent in communicating the existence, function or content of centres, which has led to an unawareness of provision in certain areas. This reticence can sometimes be due to the seasonality of audiences and the inability to cope with the sheer volume of tourist visitors during summer months. For example, in the case of Pier Arts Centre, attendance during the tourist season can be up to fifteen times that of winter months, when the centre relies on a small core of local attenders. This is one reason for the extension work currently being undertaken at the centre.

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[ Section 3 – Audience Development ]

The absence of suitable existing properties for the development of public galleries has led to a number of centres being established in more remote areas that are less accessible to audiences. To compound this, some galleries have encountered difficulties in establishing road signage to their respective centres. As visitor attractions with accreditation from VisitScotland, most centres are entitled to brown-thistle road signage to their venues.

However, this has proved difficult to attain in some areas, as local council roads departments have taken a very different interpretation of the rules governing where signage can be established. This has been particularly detrimental to developing tourist audiences, but also limits local awareness of facilities.

To allow greater access to local audiences, most of whom are at work during the main opening hours of galleries, some centres have introduced Sunday openings. In the case of Bonhoga Gallery, staff found that Sunday opening stimulated a new profile of attenders and day trippers to the more remote centre, including many more family visits. However, Sunday opening is still not appropriate in parts of the Hebrides due to strict observance of the Sabbath. In these areas, evening openings have been important, and some centres have made a regular feature of exhibition preview events promoted widely to local audiences, as opposed to the more exclusive ‘private view’ model favoured by other galleries.

Many visual arts organisations have successfully involved new audiences from their region by breaking out of the confines of their buildings and into the community. To this effect, Taigh Chearsabhagh has established a number of public art works throughout the Uists, An Tobar hold an annual ‘arts picnic’ at the Calgary Arts in Nature Sculpture Trail on Mull, and Bonhoga Gallery programme a network of five public venues with regularly changing exhibitions, including cafés and leisure centres throughout the Shetland Isles.

A number of site-specific installations have been undertaken by the aptly-titled, but now disbanded, visual arts organisation Another Space, generating huge audiences. The Magnus Arts Bus was also a popular facility with local audiences and schools, delivering exhibitions to more remote areas in a novel mobile gallery space that was perhaps less forbidding than the gallery building.

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[ Section 3 – Audience Development ]

Part Two: [ Progr amm ing ] Although the development of promotional practices and, more specifically, direct relationship marketing, has been important in bolstering audiences in rural areas, the main battles of local audience development have been won or lost in the arena of programming.

Perceptions remain of the ‘exclusivity’ and ‘irrelevance’ of modern art within the region’s rural communities, and this is often to do with the absence of context in which ‘leading edge’ artwork has begun to appear in these communities – many of which had no purposebuilt gallery space for this work until the mid 1990s.

Across the region, the exhibitions that are best-attended by local audiences are characterised by the participation of local artists (either through solo shows, collaborations, or Open events), the participation of local groups in the development of exhibitions, exhibitions with locally relevant themes (i.e. the cultural, natural and built heritage of the area), and more ‘accessible’ exhibitions, particularly those employing indigenous skills.

However, too populist an approach to programming exhibitions can inhibit art form development, and limit local exposure to more contemporary work, whilst inhibiting the inspiration and freedom of expression available to local artists exhibiting in the region.

Not-for-profit visual arts organisations in the Highlands and Islands therefore have the challenge of balancing audience development with a programming policy that can ‘push the envelope’ in terms of access to new types of work in a way that is appropriate to each gallery’s local audience.

A balance can be struck by establishing an otherwise ‘missing context’ for the contemporary visual arts within the theme of, or projects surrounding, an exhibition, through the direct involvement of local communities in developing an original piece of art, or through educational or interpretative support for the exhibitions that is both appropriate and stimulating for local audiences.

Contemporary exhibitions without a context or appropriate support or product surround have been detrimental to local audience development and have, on occasions, created some local hostility towards centres. A number of organisations who initially embarked upon a very avant garde programme have had to back pedal somewhat to win back local support.

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[ Section 3 – Audience Development ]

[ Mod els of Go od Pr act ice ]

Under Canvas

[ B o nh oga G all ery , S h etl an d I sl es ]

Challenge: Music on Shetland is a well-developed sector in which Shetland Arts Trust has invested much time and effort. However, visual arts audiences are less developed and, in 1999, Bonhoga Gallery set out to use the established Shetland music scene as the basis for an innovative and ambitious project.

Response: In 1999, Fife-based artist Richard Wemyss approached Shetland Arts Trust with a proposal to produce portraits of Shetland musicians for an exhibition at Bonhoga Gallery.

However, this idea soon began to form the basis of a broader and more inclusive project.

A collection of short-stories about Shetland music, ‘Da Vaam o' da Skynbow: Notes Between the Canvas’, was produced by writer and broadcaster Tom Morton to add elements of history and legend to the exhibition, and a series of postcards was produced featuring Wemyss’s portraits. In addition, a CD was made by the local musicians represented in the exhibition.

For maximum exposure, the project was programmed to coincide with the Cutty Sark Tall Ships Race’s arrival in Shetland, which is a time when many native Shetlanders return home.

All of these facets to the project were brought together with the appropriate title ‘Under Canvas’ and, to launch the exhibition, a large art nouveau, mirrored 1920s Spiegeltent was hired, and set up in Shetland’s main town, Lerwick. Over four days, this venue became the venue for non-stop live music from musicians featured in the exhibition and on the CD. Free buses were provided by Bonhoga Gallery to transport audiences from the Spiegeltent venue to the gallery to visit the exhibition. A series of complementary satellite exhibitions were scheduled into public buildings around Shetland during the project, and local artists were encouraged to produce work that would document the project and the impressive Tall Ships Race during the event.

Outcomes: 16,000 people visited the Spiegeltent over the four days, and many of these went on to see the exhibition. The CD accompanying the project was well received by the national music press and helped to generate exposure for the wider project and Bonhoga itself.

The CD, book and postcards produced for ‘Under Canvas’ still provide a source of income, and are a tangible legacy of the project, as well as being quality pieces of Shetland memorabilia in their own right. The project raised the profile of Shetland Arts Trust with the local public, but also closely allied visual arts with the successes of the more developed Shetland music sector.

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[ Section 3 – Audience Development ]

1. Creating a Context In an area with little to no tradition of gallery-going, and therefore a lack of context for more innovative artwork, the most successful exhibitions and projects have been those innovative enough to create a context in which contemporary visual artwork can become more relevant to the local community.

This context has been achieved in the delivery of the visual arts through the reintegration of local social and natural heritage (i.e. Taigh Chearsabhagh’s ‘Road Ends’ project, Will Maclean’s ‘Memorial of the Heroes’), through collaboration with more established local art forms such as music, poetry, indigenous crafts and story telling (i.e. Bonhoga Gallery’s ‘Under Canvas’ project), and through more familiar media such as film-making and new media (i.e.

Taigh Chearsabhagh’s ‘Uistory’).

A cairn from the project ‘Memorial of the Heroes’, commemorating the Hebridean Land Struggles.

The cairns were designed by Scottish artist, Will Maclean, and built by local stonemason, Jim Crawford.

This creation of context has often blurred the boundaries between the visual arts and heritage, sociology and other art forms, but these methods have all proved successful in developing visual arts audiences and participation in the Highlands and Islands, and should help to develop the art form in a way that is locally authentic in the longer term.

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[ Section 3 – Audience Development ]

[ Models of Good Pr actice ]

‘Uistory’ New Media Project [ T a ig h Ch e arsa bh a gh , N or th U ist ]

Challenge: Taigh Chearsabhagh is an arts centre and museum based in the Western Isles. Many of the projects that it has recently pursued have had the challenge of creating a local context and relevance, and therefore a local audience, for the visual arts in the sparsely populated Uists, by blurring A still from Taigh Chearsabhagh’s new media project, ‘Uistory’.

the

boundaries

between

the

visual

arts

and

the

documentation and interpretation of local heritage.

Response: In 2001, locally based designer and new media artist, Alec Ohnstad, was recruited to create a new media project documenting the legends of the Uists.

Initially, a number of myths and legends from the Uists were collected from local people in the best ‘oral history’ tradition, and written up as texts in both Gaelic and English. These texts then acted as the inspiration for a series of short computer animations.

As an educational component to the project, Alec worked closely with local primary school children to illustrate the stories and begin to animate and create soundtracks for each legend. He then used the illustrations created to develop final sophisticated animations for the stories.

A number of local volunteers were then recorded dictating the ‘Uistories’, again in both Gaelic and English, and these soundtracks, along with additional sound effects created by the children participating in the project, were added to the animations.

Outcomes: A ‘Uistory’ CD-Rom has now been produced, alongside an audio cassette of the stories and a guide book with map of the islands detailing the areas referred to by each story, and is now being sold by Taigh Chearsabhagh.

The project has involved local people of all ages. The use of new media has given an immediacy to this heritage project with younger audiences, whilst the Gaelic content has given a strong sense of local ownership amongst the older and indigenous people of the area. The artistic dimension has infused the process with creativity, and engaged and educated young children and, by extension, their families.

The finished product is of interest to the wide local

community and to tourist visitors to the islands, and also strengthens the centre’s economic position to continue similar work.

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2. Direct Participation Other centres have introduced new local audiences to the visual arts through the initiation of projects involving their communities directly in the creative process, often adding a more overt social and educational dimension to the process.

The ‘Road Ends’ project in the Western Isles involved the islands’ most rural communities in the creation of a number of public art works that were both sympathetic to their environment, and reinforced a sense of identity and rejuvenation in what have been areas of significant out migration.

Whereas ‘Road Ends’ took art to the most rural areas of the Outer Hebrides, Bonhoga Gallery’s ‘Street as Gallery’ project sought to displace the visual arts from their remote location on the rural West Side of Shetland by turning the main shopping street in Lerwick, Shetland’s main town, into the ‘canvas’ for the project, to maximise local participation with, and exposure to, the visual arts.

Included in the project, which took direct participation in the arts as a theme, was a photography documentation project of the life of Lerwick’s main square, ‘Da Cross’, by Adam Elder, as well as a resident pavement artist and art installations within shops. In addition, flags were created in a project with local primary school children to celebrate the history of each of the small lanes off Lerwick’s main street, the results of a children’s animation project was shown in shop windows, and art signage was created by artists in

A pavement artist speaks to local reporters in Lerwick, during the ‘Street as Gallery’ project.

collaboration with retail outlets in the town centre to produce A-Boards advertisements for these businesses. The project also encompassed three weeklong artistic residencies with ongoing workshops in an otherwise disused Lerwick building of historical importance.

Such projects have raised the awareness of the work of local galleries and challenged local perceptions of the visual arts as passive or irrelevant. As a result, they have provided advocacy for the galleries from new sectors of the community.

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[ Models of Good Pr actice ]

Road Ends Sculptures

[ T a ig h Ch e arsa bh a gh , N or th U ist ]

Challenge: The Road Ends Project was initiated in 1998 to involve the most remote and fragile communities in the Uists Detail from ‘The Listening Place’ (South Lochboisdale) by Valerie Pragnell

directly, many for the first time, in the visual arts.

Response: The Road Ends Project invited small, scattered townships to work alongside a professional artist to place an environmental sculpture in their area to celebrate their history and culture, and to experience and be a part of a creative process from start to finish.

Funded by the Scottish Arts Council National Lottery Fund and Western Isles Enterprise, it set out to bring communities

Artist Ian Stephen works with children in Balivanich on the creation of ‘Stones Swim to Islands’

together by seeking a collective response to what people felt was identifiable and important to their locality. In a wider context, the project sought to draw new visitors to these more remote places, with the artworks offering a unique interpretation

of

the

communities

and

surrounding

landscapes. In all, three artists – Roddy Mathieson, Valerie Pragnell and Ian Stephen – worked with four communities to Creation of ‘The Listening Place’ in South Lochboisdale

produce the public art works in South Lochboisdale and Benbecula between 1998 and 2000.

Outcomes: Overall, the project involved 112 adults and children at a number of levels – from completing questionnaires on what they thought was important to their community, to digging up electricity poles and actually contributing to the making of the work at the Claddach Baleshare and South Lochboisdale sites.

Signage to the sites has now been erected, and a guide leaflet to these works, as well as Taigh Chearsabhagh’s other public artworks in North Uist, has been produced. The sculptures have become tourist attractions in their own right, bringing visitors to these previously less visited, fragile communities.

Taigh Chearsabhagh was recently recognised by the British Urban

Regeneration Awards as a model for outstanding community regeneration. The Road Ends project played a key role in the receipt of this award.

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3. Viewer Supported Access to clear interpretative material on exhibitions and documentation on exhibiting artists can establish relevant ‘ways in’ to contemporary artwork for audiences. However, these tools are somewhat underdeveloped at Highlands and Islands public galleries, aside from cases in which exhibitions come with these materials already provided.

There are three key areas in which there is room for improvement in interpretation offered to audiences: •

Pre-visit, in the form of the additional distribution of interpretative synopses through programme material, exhibition posters, members’ newsletters, preview invitations, previews generated in the press, and café tabletop material in centres with catering facilities.

•

On-site, in the form of gallery interpretation panels, hand held interpretation material and free programmes, talks by exhibiting artists, activity sheets for children, gallery tours and audio interpretation where appropriate.

•

Post-visit, in the form of take-away interpretative material and on-line documentation.

Given the small number of galleries that have the time and staff resources (through Education or Arts for All posts) to produce comprehensive materials around an exhibition, the more interpretation material that can be provided to galleries as a condition of exhibition hire, the better.

Another area of underdevelopment is ‘arts appreciation’. With little public access to artwork work produced prior to the late 20th Century, Highlands and Islands audiences have little historical context of the visual arts on which to base their understanding or appreciation of the new work exhibited through the network of public galleries. However, ‘arts appreciation events’, whether formal or more innovative and accessible in style, are somewhat absent across the region since the discontinuation of the Scottish Arts Council’s ‘Lecture Scheme’.

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[ Models of Good Pr actice ]

Hangar Project

[ An ot h er Sp a ce , H i g hl ands ] Challenge: Easter Ross based visual arts organisation Another Space have always risen to the challenge of presenting ‘difficult’ contemporary work in a way that is relevant and engaging for the communities in which they exhibit. As their name suggests, Another Space concentrate on the presentation of site-specific exhibitions, which add a new dimension and context to the work for viewers.

Response: The ‘Hangar Project’ in the summer of 1999 used a large hangar on a desolate former military airfield on the Cromarty Firth to present the exhibition ‘Gernika!’. Artists from the Highlands and the Spanish Basque country, amongst others, created site specific installations for the symbolic exhibition centred around Picasso’s seminal Modernist painting The ‘Gernika!’ exhibition, which included work by Elizabeth Ogilvie and Andy Stenhouse.

'Guernica' and a pivotal event of the Twentieth century, the Spanish Civil War.

The significance of siting the exhibition on a former military airfield was not lost on artists or audiences, and during the course of project development and exhibition, Another Space used ‘Gernika!’ as a catalyst to uncover connections linking the Highlands, the Basque country and the exhibition’s subject matter through a process of community consultancy in the local press. As a result, additional documentation material was established for the exhibition, revealing amongst other things, that the Spanish monarchy took vacations in Sutherland, and that William Joyce, later Lord Haw Haw of German Nazi propaganda fame, had strong connections with Ardgay and had held pro Fascist rallies in Inverness. It was also discovered that the British Navy's Atlantic Fleet had mutinied whilst in the Cromarty Firth in 1931.

An Inverness visitor to the exhibition had served as a battallion commander in the International Brigade, two other local visitors had both fought for Republican forces in Spain, and a Gairloch lady was astounded to see a photograph of her father in a selection of Spanish Civil War images.

Outcomes: The exhibition attracted 10,000 people over just four weeks, characterised by an older profile of visitor that is uncommon to the contemporary arts, all of whom engaged with the exhibition’s subject matter. A further 2,500 people visited a subsequent three-week Highland tour of the Gernika! artworks on the Magnus Arts Bus. The exhibition toured Spain in 2000 and 2001.

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Seasonal approaches to Programming, Linear approaches to Development The seasonality of audiences is a problem to all the public galleries, and this results in many centres being somewhat overwhelmed with attenders during the tourist season, whilst struggling to attract viable local audiences on a regular basis during the winter months.

Many centres have successfully managed to bolster local attendance outside of the tourist season by adopting a seasonal approach to programming.

The programming of exhibitions involving greater local participation or interest, such as local artist Open exhibitions, has been seen to increase local attendance during the quiet season, whilst programming more ‘leading edge’ work in the summer months, when galleries have access to larger and potentially ‘niche’ audiences from tourist visitors, optimises the attendance for these exhibitions.

However, against this more seasonal and circular approach to programming, the galleries must also strive to adopt a linear approach to visual artform development, and to the development of ‘cultural capital’ within their core, year-round local audiences.

This process of development must take as its starting point the unique level of understanding and appreciation that each gallery’s local community has of the visual arts in order to be appropriate. It must also recognise the importance of establishing direct participation in, and the context and support for, its programme of exhibitions. In this way, it can be seen that local audience development is a work intensive operation, whilst developing tourist audiences is a cost-intensive one.

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Part Three: [ Education ] In an area where the visual arts are in their infancy, education projects are a hugely important audience development tool. Where more ‘leading edge’ or ‘avant garde’ work has been pursued, it has often only succeeded to attract local audience when support has been offered to audiences through comprehensive and relevant interpretation, and a relevant and engaging outreach and education programme. In this respect, a relevant ‘product surround’ is often as important as the exhibitions programmes themselves.

However, only An Lanntair and Taigh Chearsabhagh in the Western Isles and An Tuireann on Skye now have access to an Education Officer to develop this in a more sustained and structured way, whilst other centres rely heavily on artistic residencies as a means of delivering a programme of outreach and education.

Most centres programme arts workshops and classes for their communities. Most notably, art.tm offers its membership and local audiences a broad programme of art classes for a range of abilities through a roster of professional tutors. Bonhoga Gallery has also been able to deliver a packed year-round workshop programme, which is organised almost exclusively through its active and voluntary Friends Association. These workshops currently run at an impressive average of 80% of capacity attendance.

In terms of more formal education programmes, Taigh Chearsabhagh has formed an alliance with Lews Castle College to deliver HNC and Diploma courses in Art and Design within the centre. This has raised awareness of the centre, and provided opportunities for many Western Isles inhabitants to pursue a qualification in the visual arts without having to leave the islands. The range of established visual artists visiting the centre to tutor the course has also helped to raise the ambitions and standards of the visual arts locally. The courses add to the dynamism of the centre, with up to twenty visual arts students ‘in residence’ at the centre, which has an important factor in boosting activity at the centre during the quieter months of the year, which broadly coincide with college term time.

Other centres, such as Pier Arts Centre, have retained close links with alumni from local art departments in Orcadian schools and colleges, and offered students a Graduation Degree Show on their return from mainland art colleges, to provide opportunities for artists to develop their work and careers within the Orkney Isles. [ Highlands & Islands Visual Arts Marketing ]

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[ Models of Good Pr actice ]

The Scribble Festival

[ A n t u ire a nn , P or tr e e , I s l e of S ky e ] Challenge: Access to the centre had been low from local teenagers and young adults, the elderly, and populations to the south and west of Skye, for whom An Tuireann is less accessible.

Response: An Tuireann decided to address under-representation of these groups through one innovative project. The ‘Scribble Festival’ was funded by the Scottish Arts Council’s ‘Innovative Visual Arts Education Award Scheme’, the Highland Council, and sponsorship Sand drawing at the Beach Picnic (top), Alexander Technique workshop (bottom)

from local building firm Ewen Gillies matched by Arts and Business’s ‘New Partners’ fund.

The Festival, which ran over several weeks in 2001, was planned to coincide with National Big Draw Day, as well as the local Talisker Food Festival. Events included: 3 A ‘Doodle Competition’ for children was launched across the region in partnership with the West Highland Free Press newspaper to stimulate awareness of the Festival.

3 An exhibition of large drawings by Professor Tim Jones of Glasgow School of Art was held in the main gallery, and practical workshops on drawing using movement and the ‘Alexander Technique’ were held with the over-sixties and special needs groups.

3 Eight students from Glasgow School of Art also conducted drawing-based residencies with children within four schools on the island and on the neighbouring island of Raasay.

3 Two cartoon workshops were held with 14-18 year olds looking at communicating ideas and issues through drawing and humour.

3 ‘Talisker Beach Drawing Picnic’ was held on the west of Skye to decentralise activity away from Portree, to tie in with the Food Festival, and to encourage family participation.

3 A ‘Scribble Room’ was created in the centre’s second gallery, where children and young people were encouraged to add to the drawings and scribbles on the walls over the period of the Festival.

Outcomes: The delivery of the Festival over several weeks allowed for the dispersion of allimportant word-of-mouth within the community, and had a cumulative effect on audiences. The centre received over 200 entries for the ‘Doodle Competition’, whilst the ‘Scribble Room’ proved extremely popular with local teenagers! The Festival is thought to have made a lasting impact on local awareness of An Tuireann and its work across Skye, and was highly commended in the annual awards of Drawing Power, the organisation behind the National Big Draw Day.

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Schools As part of the Visual Arts Marketing Project, research was conducted with all standard and higher level high school art teachers across the Highlands and Islands to establish how well the network of public galleries were used as a resource by local schools.

Of the thirty respondents to surveys, only 50% of the schools made use of their local public gallery. In many cases, travel was cited as a reason for not using the galleries more often. Indeed, the average distance of respondents from their local gallery is 30 miles, and traveling to these facilities also means a ferry journey for many. As a result, many teachers reported that they could not justify the time out of school to visit the relatively small exhibitions that the visual arts centres of the Highlands and Islands could accommodate.

As a result, over 70% of those surveyed agreed that visits by a touring arts bus would be their ideal solution to access issues, along with greater amount of outreach work from public galleries to service a wider area.

However, a number of schools from the Highlands, Lochaber and Argyll currently run excursions to Central Belt galleries, as the scale and provision of these facilities can justify a day or more out of school. These galleries often offer educational support for schools through more established and permanent collections. This is one of the prime arguments for the establishment of a major gallery facility and permanent art collection in the central Highlands.

The majority of teachers surveyed suggested that the provision of teaching and interpretative material around exhibitions, along with greater consultation with schools on programming or greater forwarning of exhibitions, would encourage greater use of local facilities. A number of teachers pointed to a need for educational and interpretative materials to be produced centrally when originating touring exhibitions, rather than relying on individual host galleries.

Almost 50% of teachers mentioned that they would welcome the introduction of school liaison or education posts within all public galleries. However, of the art teachers surveyed, 75% believed that there was potential to work more closely with their local public galleries.

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[ Mode l of Good Pra ct ice ]

‘Portraits and Dreams’ Exhibition

[ A n T u ire a nn , P or tr e e , I s l e of S ky e ]

Challenge: In 2001, An Tuireann had the challenge of stimulating interest and participation around a major photography exhibition ‘Portraits and Dreams’ from communities more remote to the centre. The exhibition was the result of a collaboration between artist Wendy Ewald and children from a similarly rural community in Kentucky, and explored the lives and dreams of the children through their own eyes. The exhibition was secured for An Tuireann through Stills Gallery in Edinburgh.

Response: An Tuireann set about creating an educational project around the exhibition by mirroring the project Ewald had undertaken in Kentucky with local primary children from the rural community of Glenelg, some 30 miles from An Tuireann.

Western Isles-based photographer, Olwen Shone, led the project, which placed importance on getting the children into the gallery space itself and engaging with the exhibition. An initial trip to the gallery was made by the group to consider and take inspiration from the Ewald exhibition.

Artist Olwen Shone with the children involved in the project

Having seen the

exhibition, the children were all presented with disposable cameras to begin to document their own lives and dreams.

A room within the Glenelg primary school was turned into a dark room, and the children were taught techniques for developing their films. A creative writing aspect to the project was also undertaken by Glenelg primary school, and the children created short texts to complement their photographs. The resulting images and texts were then framed by the gallery and presented alongside the Ewald exhibition at An Tuireann.

On National Children’s Art Day in 2001, the children involved in the project, along with their friends and families, were invited to an afternoon reception at the gallery to see the exhibitions side by side.

Outcomes: By using the exhibition and gallery as a main reference point for the project, the centre was able to engage the children with the artwork and stimulate attendance. The exhibition of the children’s work in the gallery itself drew many visits from the Glenelg community, encouraged local ownership of the centre, and empowered the children with new skills.

An image created for the project by Glenelg children

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Part Four: [ T he Mar ket in g Mix ] In terms of annual expenditure on marketing activity, all of the centres involved in the Visual Arts Marketing Project are below the recommended marketing budget figure of 10% of annual turnover. In addition, a number of centres are not properly budgeting the costs of marketing into their applications for project and touring exhibition funding.

A large amount of marketing activity conducted by these centres is intrinsic within the delivery of projects, and is therefore work intensive rather than cost intensive, however, generic and direct marketing pratices are somewhat underdeveloped within centres.

For instance, in some cases, the branding of organisations was found to be inconsistent across the promotional material, advertising and signage, which compromised immediate recognition of the centre’s publicity and lessened the impact of simultaneous promotional campaigns. In a few cases, generic promotional leaflets were not available for the centre, or had not been distributed effectively. This all had a detrimental effect, especially on tourist attendance at centres, and is reflected in the number of visitors to centres reporting that they had stumbled on the venue by accident rather than planned their visit.

Media Local press coverage is an extremely important marketing tool for rural galleries, and the exceptionally high support and readership for local newspapers in the Highlands and Islands means that any positive editorial coverage generated can offer strong ‘peer endorsement’ of these centres to local communities.

An example of this is the Shetland Times, which has an estimated readership of 13,000 in an area with a population of just 23,000. Local community newsletters are also a feature of the region, and can have even more impact within communities. What is more, these publications are often read cover to cover.

However, local newspapers often do not have dedicated arts reporters or reviewers, and therefore the profile and standard of arts editorial is often low, especially for the visual arts.

In a number of cases, galleries have been asked to preview or review on behalf of local

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newspapers. Whilst this is a welcome development, it does not give the ‘third party endorsement’ of the centre’s work which can be provided by independent writers.

As a result of this, HI~Arts has committed to establishing an online arts journal for the region, which will seek to commission features on arts events and exhibitions from local writers and, potentially, to give basic training for new writers. It is hoped that such a project will also have a wider impact upon regional media coverage.

Another potential solution to this would be the establishment of an ‘arts writer vocational scholarship’ post supported by, and shared between, a number of local newspapers, with the aim of reporting a diverse range of events, exhibitions and arts activities for a range of local publications and media.

A similar lack of coverage of the galleries exists in the national press, but for different reasons. More often than not, the arts departments at national newspapers cannot justify the expense of review trips to Highlands and Islands galleries. As a result, many key visual arts journalists have not seen many of the regions recent gallery developments, and therefore do not consider them when searching for stories.

A potential model for the development of national media coverage of the regions arts can be found later in the report. However, in the shorter term, there is a need for galleries to pursue national coverage more thoroughly, and ensure that press releases are followed up with phone calls to relevant journalists.

Communication It is important that a gallery communicates appropriately with its potential audience, whether through promotional material, advertising or editorial. The language used by centres to promote exhibitions to local communities is sometimes unnecessarily formal and inappropriate to target attenders and, in the worst cases, includes art school ‘jargon-ese’ copied word-for-word from the artist’s statement.

In general, the participating galleries are careful to programme exhibitions that will have some sort of resonance with local communities. However, the reasons behind their choice

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of programming and the exhibition’s relevance to the community are not always communicated effectively within promotional material.

In addition, galleries often miss opportunities to highlight the stature and importance of many of their exhibiting artists to local audiences, who are sometimes unaware of the repute of artists working and exhibiting in their community.

A model of communication that has been adopted by the performing arts sector appeals more to the potential audience’s sensations and emotions than to overly technical language, and involves anticipating the potential attender’s questions about the exhibition (“What will I see?”, “How will it make me feel?”, etc.) and answering them in an enticing and appropriate way.

A number of performing arts venues have also used the method of ‘personal endorsements’ in promotional material to good effect. This has often taken the form of short recommendations for each forthcoming exhibition from a number of ‘voices’ of the organisation (i.e. staff, board, Friends members) within programme material. This often provides more forceful advocacy for attendance than a third person monologue can.

Given that all the Hebridean galleries involved in the marketing project have Gaelic names, there are also opportunities to make better use of the language to engage with indigenous Gaelic-speaking audiences in direct marketing material, especially in the Western Isles.

Indeed, there appear to be no clear policies for the use of Gaelic in many of these centres, and it is recommended that policies for Gaelic use be clarified within the ‘marketing mix’ of these centres.

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Direct Marketing and Data Capture Both TGI statistics and ACORN classifications are somewhat redundant in establishing and targeting certain audience profiles in rural areas such as the Highlands and Islands, and neither can visual arts organisations with such a finite potential customer base afford to concentrate exclusively on any one niche audience segment.

However, all galleries participating in the Visual Arts Marketing Project are involved in direct marketing activity to current customers, primarily through the mailing of preview invitations, members’ newsletters and the like. Most centres hold a number of databases, including local artists, members, stakeholders, local VIPs, art buyers, and so on.

However, many centres currently have poor practices in the retention and upkeep of customer data, sometimes holding multiple lists with duplicate records or having no processes for cleaning out old and out-of-date addresses from their databases.

As a result of the marketing project, many centres have now created centralised and segmented databases, which are easier to maintain and cross-reference, and can automate processes such as annual renewal notices for members. In addition, a number of centres have started to stamp outgoing mail with the centre’s return postal address to ensure outof-date addresses are removed from the database. This not only saves postage costs, but is also crucial to compliance with the Data Protection Act. A greater percentage of people from the Highlands and Islands have access to the Internet than in many other areas of the country, and some galleries have started to develop direct email databases to conduct direct marketing. Email distribution is free, has greater immediacy than direct mail, and can be used to hold a two-way dialogue with audiences.

Email distribution is an especially useful tool for centres with catering and retailing facilities to quickly and effectively promote new lines of stock, or incentivised offers.

Centres have recruited people to their email lists through in-house sign-up sheets, on-line forms on their websites, and incentivised email sign-up campaigns to local businesses with email addresses in the public domain.

An Tuireann gallery and the Aros Centre, the Isle of Skye’s main performance venue and cinema, have worked cooperatively to build email databases to cross-promote the arts on [ Highlands & Islands Visual Arts Marketing ]

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Skye. However, this example of a cooperative approach between arts organisations is the exception rather than the rule, and there are many opportunities to develop marketing coordination between organisations where audience cross-over exists. For instance, a strong cross-over between visual arts and contemporary dance audiences exist and, in this case, there are opportunities for art.tm to collaborate with Eden Court, Inverness’ main performance venue, on promotion. It is one aim of the Highlands and Islands Audience Development Project to develop these links.

Tourist Promotion Whilst marketing to local audiences is primarily time-consuming, marketing to visitor audiences is costly. However, as tourists often make up 60% or more of galleries customer base, this is a market they can not afford to ignore. This means that there is a continued need for public galleries to adopt local tourist board membership and conduct a basic amount of advertising in the main tourist publications.

VisitScotland Visitor Attraction Commendation is also now an essential for these organisations, and the absence of this award on publicity material and in advertisements can look conspicuous when all other visitor attractions have commendation. The commendation process itself has been useful for organisations to indicate where improvements can be made to better serve their audiences.

The centres involved in the marketing project should all be achieving a four star commendation as a minimum. All have the facilities to achieve this level of commendation, and any less suggests basic weaknesses in customer service, or other barriers to accessibility.

On the other hand, whilst tourist audiences are primarily seasonal, the public galleries must cater for local audiences on a year-round basis, and it is suggested that the requirements for achieving five-star visitor attraction status can sometimes threaten the informality of venues that makes them more appealing and accessible to local audiences.

Therefore, a balanced approach is required here.

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Part Five: [ Advocacy ] To explore the issue of local advocacy for visual arts centres, one must take into account the issue of their establishment. Almost without exception, the galleries that have been able to generate the most support and attendance from local audiences have been those that have been created as a result of ‘grassroots development’, as opposed to being ‘imposed’ on communities in any way.

The best example of grassroots development is Taigh Chearsabhagh in North Uist, a centre which was established as the result of collaboration between two well-established community groups – the Uist Arts Association and the North Uist Historial Society. The direct participation of these groups, and the subsequent sense of centre ownership that this engendered locally, add to the centre’s relevance and appropriateness to local audiences.

It this way, it can be seen that centres that have been established as the result of grassroots development have a head start on other centres in terms of local advocacy. However, whilst the way in which centres are established is important in establishing community support in the short term, many centres have found ways to foster local support and ownership, primarily by generating positive local word of mouth and advocacy.

In small, close-knit rural communities, word of mouth plays an extremely important role.

In the public galleries in which surveys were conducted, 30% of visitors to galleries stated that they had visited the centre on the recommendation of another. This compares to an average of 5% of visitors who had picked up a leaflet or 10% who had seen a poster.

Whilst this may be explained in part by underdeveloped generic marketing, it follows a pattern for rural areas. Word of mouth or ‘peer endorsement’ is not only important in stimulating local attendance, but it is also essential for attracting tourist visitors, who often rely on recommendations from the likes of local guest house proprietors, shop staff and taxi drivers to plan their itineraries. Therefore, if local support can be established, this inevitably has a positive knock-on effect on tourist audiences.

In terms of tourism, many galleries feel that their local tourist boards are not providing an advocacy role for the arts, and a number of tourist boards have not yet substantially integrated the area’s arts into their promotion of the area or used the arts as a tool for stimulating niche tourism.

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Creating Advocacy in the Community Galleries have been able to create local advocacy for their centres in a variety of ways, including the establishment of local ambassadors for galleries through Friends membership schemes, talks with community groups and the facilitation of local art group exhibitions.

The documentation and promotion of local outreach and education work that has been conducted by the centre is also important for raising awareness and support for facilities.

Some of the galleries involved in the project have actively targeted local groups, businesses and industries that are under-represented in the audiences of the centre, and invited them to familiarisation events. Particularly useful familiarisation events have been held for tourist industry ‘frontliners’, such as local guesthouse and bed and breakfast proprietors, taxi drivers , tour guides and tourist informnation staff, who all have the potential to play a key advocacy role for centres.

An advantage of working in a small community is the potential to target these underrepresented audiences very precisely, and a number of galleries have used innovative arts projects to involve new audiences and develop advocates for centres for new and unexpected audiences. Good examples of this include An Tobar Arts Centre’s ‘Garages’ and ‘In Shore’ projects, which were developed by professional visual artists in close collaboration with the Isle of Mull’s garage mechanics and fishermen respectively.

Both of these projects placed a genuine respect for these skilled manual workers at the heart of the creation of an art exhibition and, as a result, have generated advocacy for the centre from these groups.

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[ Models of Good Pr actice ]

’Treasure Island’ Garages Project [ An To bar , Isl e of M ull ] Challenge: An Tobar had an absence of certain profiles of attender at their arts centre.

Most notably, attendance and

participation was low from local male, skilled manual workers.

Response: To address this, a very specific project was devised in 2001 around the origination of an exhibition, in which this key audience sector would play a leading role.

The project, funded by the now-unavailable New Directions funding, took the life and work of the mechanics of the island’s six rural garages as its inspiration, and a professional arts photographer from Manchester, Dinu Li, was recruited to develop an exhibition for An Tobar by working through a series of residencies within these garages.

Dinu worked alongside the mechanics, using their

narratives to inform his approach to the creation of the exhibition.

A series of photographs were taken, along with oral histories from each participating mechanic.

The resulting exhibition, ‘Treasure Island’ juxtaposes abstract photographs depicting scenes within the workspaces of the local garages with sound recordings of their experiences, and ideas and beliefs with regards to modernity and tradition. The resulting exhibition installation served to celebrate this particular group of islanders, alongside the unique loyalty of the residents towards each other and their environment.

Outcomes: Through the project, a sector of the community became directly involved in the life and work of the centre and the creation of art. The men involved all visited the centre to see the exhibition with their families and, for some, it was the first time they had visited the centre. A number have continued to attend as a result of the project. However, An Tobar are confident that, even those who are still not regular attenders, are now much more inclined to spread positive word of mouth about the centre to Dinu Li with the participants and images of the Garages Project

family, friends and island visitors.

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Creative Partnerships Given a shortage of sponsorship opportunities for public galleries in the Highlands and Islands, mainly due to the lack of medium to large scale businesses based in the region, the arts sector has sought other creative ways of collaborating with community businesses and organisations.

An Tobar has developed links with a variety of businesses and voluntary groups across Mull by presenting exhibitions in ‘partnership’ with local businesses and groups. These partnerships can raise the profile of the arts centre in the wider community by directly involving new groups and encourage greater ownership of centres by local communities.

Often the level of sponsorship involved in such collaborations is low, although partners will often cover the costs of entertaining at preview events. However, many more ‘inkind’ benefits exist for both parties.

For the gallery, partnerships are a way of actively targeting and involving new groups that may not usually attend exhibitions. Community partnerships also often help to make exhibitions more newsworthy locally, and bring wider community recognition and endorsement for the centre’s work.

Practical benefits for partners can include branding within the centre and on exhibition publicity, and partnerships with exhibitions can raise awareness of the partner’s business or group through enhanced press coverage and word of mouth. Partners can use exhibition previews to entertain their staff, customers, clients and friends, and charities can use them as fundraising events.

There are also opportunities for skills to be shared between Highlands businesses and the arts, as is being proved by the current partnership between Timespan Heritage Centre and Gallery in Sutherland and Marks and Spencer management staff. Here, thanks to an Arts and Business mentoring initiative, Timespan are working with professional retail managers to improve the centre’s organisational practices and its potention for income generation, especially within its shop and café facilities.

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Gallery Friends Friends Groups and Associations can also provide strong links into the community and develop advocacy at a grassroots level. However, few arts centres have yet developed these schemes to their full potential, and many operate Friends groups simply as donation schemes.

Bonhoga Gallery Friends Association is perhaps the best example of a proactive scheme, which engenders a strong sense of centre ownership within its members. Through the voluntary assistance of the Friends, the centre has been able to deliver a year-round community workshop programme, and they are also proactive fundraisers for the centre and a stimulus for social events.

It is not only important for Friends schemes to clearly promote relevant benefits to potential members, but schemes should also specify tangible benefits of membership fees to the organisation to show subscribers that they are making a difference to the centre – whether this be in terms of the annual number of workshops supported by the Friends fund, or a specific piece of equipment for the centre that was secured through donations.

Given that all visual arts centres involved in the Visual Arts Marketing Project have ‘Friends’ or ‘Arts Association’ membership schemes, it is recommended that all consortium galleries extended the benefits of their scheme to the members of ‘sister’ schemes across the region.

Between them, the public galleries have Friends or equivalent membership schemes of around 1000 people, the majority of whom are residents of the Highlands and Islands.

Developing reciprocal benefits for these schemes across organisations will add value to all centre’s memberships, whilst strengthening the cohesion and cross-promotion between public sector galleries.

Recommendations

Responsibility

The region’s public galleries should extend the benefits of their respective Friends and membership schemes to all other visual arts consortium galleries’ members.

Visual Arts Consortium

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[ Case Study ]

Gallery Friends Association [ B o nh oga G all ery , S h etl an d ]

Description: Bonhoga Gallery Friends Association is currently the only truly proactively, independently-constituted Friends scheme belonging to a public gallery in the Highlands and Islands.

Led by a small but hands-on committee, the scheme provides all the normal benefits of a Friends group (i.e. shop and cafĂŠ discounts, invitation to preview events, priority events information), but also organises a highly-successful workshop programme throughout the year, employing local and visiting artists to run more than 20 sessions annually catering for all ages-ranges and abilities.

The workshops often link into, and therefore cross-promote, the gallery’s main

exhibitions programme.

The Friends play a voluntary role in staffing preview events at the centre, and run innovative fundraising projects at Bonhoga Gallery, which also serves to generate access and participation with the centre. Being independent from the gallery has allowed the Friends to access additional funding sources for their activities, and matching funding from the Friends Association also helps with Bonhoga Gallery funding applications. Indeed, the Friends are currently working with Shetland Arts Trust to secure funding for a small second building on Bonhoga Gallery grounds for a more permanent workshop, studio and curation space.

Bonhoga Gallery Friends Association has around 100 members, including a small number of life members, and the workshops organised by the Friends run at an average of 80% of capacity.

Administration: Bonhoga Gallery staff provide administrative support and facilities for the Friends, and help promote the membership to regular customers and buyers. Members are recorded on a Microsoft Access spreadsheet that automates the process of printing monthly membership renewal labels and letters. New and renewing Friends are always sent a small gift by the centre in their initial mailing.

Development: The Friends are now exploring the development of membership payments by standing order to limit the administration work of the scheme, and hope to produce a regular newsletter to further develop communication with members.

Bonhoga Gallery Friends Association is now applying to become a registered charity.

Weisdale Mill on the rural West Side of Shetland is home to the Bonhoga Gallery

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Part Six: [ R e ta il & Ca ter ing ] Retailing All of the centres involved in the Visual Arts Marketing Project rely, to some extent, on revenue generated through retailing. Whilst each centre’s retail facilities are unique, the most successful retailing operations across the sector are characterised by a number of features: •

A more ‘familiar’ shop environment is conducive to comfortable browsing, as is a low-key and unimposing cash or reception desk.

•

Well-stocked, themed display areas, as opposed to more sparse or minimalist displays, are proven to raise average visitor spend and repeat attendances.

•

The stocking of products distinct to those of other local outlets ensures against friction with other local businesses and provides distinct market positioning.

•

The close integration of centre retailing facilities, through stock that reflects other areas of the centre’s work, provides a more rounded overall product, and can be more easily cross-promoted in-house and through centre promotional material.

•

Centres have fluctuating customer profiles throughout the year, and the most successful retailing facilities have recognised this, and change their stock accordingly throughout the year to reflect changes in their customer base.

•

The regular rotation of stock within small retail spaces encourages regular and repeat attendance from local audiences.

•

A proactive approach to capitalising upon periods of increased public spending, such as Christmas, Easter and Valentine’s Day, has led to a trebling of average customer spend in a number of centres at these times.

•

Sound promotional practices through direct mail, local advertising, gift voucher sales and stock launch events have all proved successful.

•

Where staff are well-briefed and knowledgeable about stock and the artists or makers represented in the retail areas, they are better equipped to make sales.

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The average customer spend on retailing across the centres involved in the marketing project is £1.35. This is remarkably low, and compares to an estimated average customer spend in visitor attractions across Scotland of £2.12 per person*. Of course, visitor attractions are more reliant on revenue raised by retailing activities for their long term survival, and this discrepancy is also in part due to the lack of retail and display space within many centres. However, it also reflects an underdevelopment of retailing practices across the not-for-profit visual arts sector.

A good example of maximising the potential of a gallery’s shop can be found in Shetland, where the management of Bonhoga Gallery takes a shrewd approach to retailing. The centre’s shop concentrates on quality stock, including jewellery and art cards, alongside a primarily sales-driven exhibition programme. With its rural, ‘out of the way’ location on the island, the centre puts an emphasis on uniqueness, and the sourcing of new and exciting design-led products from the major UK gift fairs to ensure that the centre can draw niche markets from further afield on the island.

Bonhoga Gallery ensure a regular rotation of stock, and have developed exhibition preview events to coincide with new stock preview events, thus integrating the retail and artistic functions of the building. The centre also develops a local ‘buyers mailing list’, by collecting the names and addresses of customers purchasing higher-value items through its shop. The buyers list is also used to invite regular customers to preview events, and to cross-promote the centre’s other facilities and services, such as the café and Bonhoga Gallery Friends Association.

Over time, these policies have led to an increasing customer base for the shop itself, making it an integral audience development tool for the centre as a whole, rather than a secondary provision.

*1999 Visitor Attraction Monitor figures

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Stock Sourcing Whilst all the centres’ retailing operations are unique, with stock that is appropriate to their differing functions, audience profiles and local competitors, there is enough cross-over in the types of stock promoted by each centre to warrant a more cooperative approach to merchandise sourcing. Indeed, given that it is in centres’ interests to position themselves as unique from other local commercial outlets, the sourcing of original and unique stock becomes increasingly important, and this is often ‘design-led’ stock.

A number of centres already attend national craft and gift fairs to source new stock lines, but this is costly, and currently conducted in an ad-hoc and autonomous way by each centre. There would be benefits for all consortium members if research visits to appropriate trade fairs could be shared to ensure coverage of more fairs and, therefore, access to more new lines. In this way, participating centres would attend key national craft and gift fairs in rotation to research stock and collate information on stock lines to be circulated to consortium members.

From such a collaborative approach, the consortium should explore the establishment of a joint purchasing scheme for stock lines to take advantage of the economies of bulk buying.

The Euro has now also become increasingly important for consortium galleries given high numbers of European visitors, and it is recommended that such a retailing consortium could together explore systems for taking the currency in their respective organisations.

Commissioning Designer Stock Alongside the potential to share the sourcing of stock, there are opportunities for the consortium centres to work together to develop original commissioned designer stock from Scottish and international artists. The network of retail outlets actually makes this a financially viable way to develop new and unique stock, whilst also supporting the area’s artists and designers.

Recommendations

Responsibility

A retail consortium should be established to maximise attendance at key national craft and gift trade fairs, and to explore other retailing initiatives such as the commissioning of designer stock and acceptance of the Euro.

Visual Arts Consortium

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Artwork sales Artwork sales are a small but important revenue stream for many centres, although, with commission charged by the public galleries on artwork sold set at around 35%, it is not the most important component of many of the centre’s retail operations.

To ensure the accessibility of artwork and crafts sales in an area with little tradition of collecting work, a number of centres have insisted upon artists and makers providing a number of more affordable pieces of work for sale within exhibitions as part of their contract with exhibitors. This has proved successful with local audiences, and offered audiences a ‘way in’ to the collection of artwork.

Clear display material about the background and practice of exhibiting artists, alongside demonstrations and talks by the artists themselves, can also provide a more personal touch to the experience of art buying, and has encouraged sales.

Other centres have successfully used their café facilities as an additional space in which to exhibit more saleable artwork, often by local artists, to complement a less commercial programme in the main gallery. The exhibition of art in the more domestic café environment has been useful in encouraging sales of work, as it can give audiences the time and environment in which to imagine the artwork within their own homes.

Bonhoga Gallery’s ‘A5 exhibition’ is a good example of a project that has overcome perceptional barriers to the purchase of artwork. For the exhibition, which was a fundraiser for the gallery’s Friends Association, almost 400 numbered A5 clipframes were distributed to local artists, community members and to a small number of eminent nationally-recognised artists. All of these people were asked to create an unsigned piece of art that could be mounted in the clipframe and then send it back to Bonhoga Gallery.

The returned clipframes, complete with artwork, were then exhibited at the centre, and all marked up at a sales price of £10. Only once the exhibition was over, and most of the artwork had been sold, did the centre reveal the artists behind each work, to show who had bought the work of a local first-time amateur artist, and who had made a profitable investment by purchasing a piece by a reputable professional. The project challenged perceptions about the value and worth of the visual arts in a way that was engaging for local audiences. [ Highlands & Islands Visual Arts Marketing ]

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Finally, to develop the accessibility of art work purchases to local audiences, the interestfree ‘loan purchase scheme’ currently being researched by the Scottish Arts Council should be prioritised. There is huge demand for this scheme, and a number of regional commercial galleries already run informal loan purchase schemes for customers, but this can prove to be financially risky.

Given the emergence of a public fascination for interior design, not least through television programmes such as ‘Changing Rooms’, there is currently increased interest in original artwork. However, there is a need to develop access to costly art purchases in areas with no current culture of purchasing original artwork. The existence of a network of galleries already collaborating on marketing issues, make the Highlands and Islands an ideal area in which to trial such a scheme.

Catering Seven of the organisations involved in the Visual Arts Marketing Project have cafés within their centres. Whilst each of these catering facilities is unique in terms of the product and experience that it offers, none contribute to the income of the centre in any substantial way, and a number actually make small losses.

In some cases, these losses made by the café operations at centres have been written off as a ‘marketing expense’, and there is some evidence to support the argument that a gallery’s café can be a tool for marketing development. From qualitative research undertaken during the marketing project, it was estimated that one in three café patrons would not described themselves as gallery attenders but, as a result of visiting the café, had gone on to visit an exhibition or to participate in the centre’s visual arts programme in some other way.

Indeed, a number of centres have managed to integrate their catering facilities into the artisitic life of the centre in order to maximise this cross-over in audiences through the displays of artwork in their café, tabletop exhibition promotional material and interpretation and, in the case of Taigh Chearsabhagh, a monthly ongoing poetry sheet which visitors are encouraged to add to during their time in the centre.

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Part Seven: [ R es ea r c h & Mo n i t or in g ] The research practices of the participating organisations were found to be somewhat adhoc, and most of the participating galleries had a clear but informal knowledge of local attenders. However, few had undertaken substantial research or consultation with local community members – especially non-attenders – to establish the reasons why a large proportion of the community is effectively excluded from the gallery experience.

In particular, the comparatively slow turnaround of staff within these organisations has added to a culture of informal and under-developed research and monitoring of audiences and projects, and staff have instead developed a ‘feel’ for which marketing and programming activities work with local communities and which do not. However, this is a concerning situation if this knowledge cannot then be passed on in a more practical way to future gallery programmers and staff with responsibilities for marketing.

During the course of the marketing project, recommendations were made on research practices, and it is further recommended that project participants coordinate their research so that results can be cross-referenced across consortium galleries.

Monitoring the Visual Arts Marketing Project Whilst recommendations have been made to each participating organisation on the implementation and monitoring of the strategic marketing plans produced for them during the course of the Visual Arts Marketing Project, a number of additional support mechanisms are recommended below.

Recommendations

Responsibility

Advice and support for the implementation and monitoring of marketing plans will now be ‘mainstreamed’ through the local network of HIE-Marks Marketing Advisors.

HIE-Marks

HI~Arts have committed to evaluating the impact of the Visual Arts Marketing Project one year after its end, in August 2003.

HI~Arts

The visual arts consortium should continue to meet in order to develop the recommendations of the report.

Visual Arts Consorium / HI~Arts

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S e c t i o n

F o u r :

[ Visual Arts Practitioners ] This section contains an overview of the challenges faced by the region’s visual arts practitioners, and explores the relationship between these artists and the not-for-profit galleries of the Highlands and Islands. The section goes on to recommend further ways of supporting the development and promotion of artists from the region.

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Part One: [ S e ct o r S iz e & C ha r a c t er is t i cs ] The Economic Impact of the Arts in the Highlands and Islands 2001 study estimates that over 100 professional and semi-professional visual artists are reliant on the region’s galleries to exhibit and sell their work. This excludes a large number of artists using their own open studio spaces to sell work from.

Visual artists are known for their isolationism, and this is perhaps even truer for artists in the rural Highlands and Islands. Few support networks exist locally for artists and there is currently little culture of, or provision for, communities of artists coming together to work in shared studio spaces, even in more populated areas.

It is now widely recognised that many talent visual artists work within the Highlands and Islands. However, many artists struggle to make a viable income from their practice whilst remaining within the region, the main reasons for this being: •

the comparative isolation of the area from key national and international markets

•

the expense and practical difficulties of transporting work

•

the existence of only small markets for contemporary work within the area

As a result, many fine artists who have either grown up in the Highlands and Islands, or who have been drawn to the area to work, not least because of the staggering natural beauty, seclusion and peace of the area, are forced to leave the Highlands and Islands because they are unable to make a living in the area. This is particularly true for young artists who leave the area to attend art school, and often do not return because of a perceived lack of opportunity to progress their careers.

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Part Two: [ R ela t io ns h ip w ith Pub l ic Gal le r ie s ] The establishment of the Pier Arts Centre in Orkney in 1979, although welcomed by many Orcadians at the time, is an example of a visual arts facility that came about as the result of influences from outside of the community, rather than being an essentially ‘communitydriven’ development. However, in the years since 1979, due to its hugely prestigious and nationally reknowned permanent collection, the Pier established Orkney as the natural place for visual arts practitioners to come to work within the Highlands and Islands over the last 20 years, and has therefore built up a large and talented visual arts community over and above that of other areas.

However, in other areas, the public galleries have been relative late-comers to the scene. In these areas, a handful of now well-known and nationally-recognised artists have established themselves by developing links with the commercial gallery sector, both within and, more often, outside of the area. In this way, most of these more established artists have ‘bypassed’ the new not-for-profit visual arts sector in the Highlands and Islands, and links between the public galleries and the most prolific artists in the area remain somewhat weak.

If the public sector does not become more relevant to the development of the next generation of emerging local artists, then these links will remain underdeveloped and, as a result, the public galleries may not be representative of emerging visual artists in a way that is authentic to the art form development of the area at grassroots level.

In some areas, the relationships between the public galleries and local visual arts practitioners is an uneasy one, and many semi-professional and professional artists believe that their local public visual arts facility should be doing more to support their practice and professional development.

This has, on occasion, led to a lack of support for local public galleries from this key constituency, which is detrimental given the importance of word of mouth within the region and the lack of other niche audiences for the visual arts in the area. In other words, if this key artistic constituency is not prepared to promote their local arts centre to visitors to the area, it is less likely that others will.

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Part Three: [ Sup por t Mechanisms ] Given the isolationism and dispersion of many artists throughout the Highlands and Islands, providing relevant support mechanisms to practitioners is problematic.

Where localised visual arts associations do exist, these often fail to meet the varying needs of a broad constituency of practitioners, which can often include hobbyists and professionals, working in both the visual and applied arts. This lack of focus and qualitycontrol within many of groups and associations means that they are of little relevance in the development and promotion of professional visual arts practice.

With the lack of any other localised formal channels of support for artists, local artists’ networks or cooperatives, many practitioners look to their local public gallery to provide a supportive, developmental or advocacy role.

The fact that artists in a number of areas have been dissatisfied with the supporting role that their local public arts centres have been able to play suggests that these galleries should either look at ways to support and promote local artistic practice better, or communicate the bounds of their remit more clearly to this key group.

However, some centres have been able to provide basic support and promotion for their local artistic community. For example, An Tuireann maintains a portfolio detailing local artists and their work within its gallery space, An Tobar produces and distributes a leaflet promoting the work of Mull artists, and An Lanntair has showcased local artists’ work on their website.

The Highland Council Exhibition Unit holds the largest commissioning register of over 100 practicing artists in the Highland region. However, this is held in hard copy, is not effectively promoted, and is time-consuming for the Exhibitions Unit to keep up-to-date.

However, it is more often that artists look to public galleries to play a more timeconsuming advisory or mentoring role, which centres are not always best placed to undertake. In addition, public galleries must ensure that they meet the needs of their broader local constituencies before those of any single group. However, there is potential to deliver such guidance and support mechanisms for local artists through a collaborative approach across the regional consortium of public galleries.

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Information Services One of the centres that is doing the most to support local artist practice and development is art.tm in Inverness, particularly through its regular newsletter publication which offers news and opportunities that are of particular relevance to Highland-based artists. The newsletter is popular with the centre’s members, even beyond the Highland Council region in which it operates.

Of all the centres, art.tm traditionally has more of a strategic remit for artist support, given its roots as Highland Printmakers’ Workshop and, rather than each participating gallery replicating the work of producing such a newsletter, it is recommended that art.tm broaden their responsibility for artist support through the production of quarterly news and opportunity bulletins for artists across the wider Highlands and Islands region.

Whilst there are many funding opportunities for visual artists in the region from local, national and international agencies, artists find it difficult to get access to this information, and one role of the newsletter would be to promote potential sources of funding.

Such a publication could be produced and distributed under the art.tm brand or, perhaps more appropriately from the perspective of establishing closer relationships between artists and their local public galleries, could be distributed and branded locally by each participating gallery. In this way, the public galleries can establish a reputation as a more relevant and trusted local source of support for artists’ practice.

A virtual community for the area’s visual artists was established as part of the Visual Arts Marketing Project. This online forum now has some 68 members, including artists and arts administrators, and it is recommended that this continues to be monitored and managed through art.tm as an extension of their current work in artists’ support.

Recommendations

Responsibility

Art.tm should broaden its key role as an information provider for the visual arts sector by coordinating the production of a quarterly artists’ newsletter for distribution through consortium galleries.

The online forum for Highlands and Islands visual artists should continue, and the role for managing this forum should be taken on by art.tm.

art.tm / Visual Arts Consortium

art.tm

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Online Promotion The establishment of websites as a key medium for promotion and exposure for visual artists has been especially beneficial to artists based in rural and remote areas, as it allows them to compete on a more even playing field, alongside city based artists with greater access to the broader visual arts marketplace.

The online AXIS national artists’ database is of particular use, as it allows Highlands and Islands artists to display their work alongside their urban counterparts. In the early days of AXIS, one-off free membership of the scheme was awarded to a number of local artists to bolster the representation from Highlands and Islands artists on the system, through funding from Highlands and Islands Enterprise. Membership retention from this initiallyinvited group of artists has been favourably high. The artists that report the greatest success rate from AXIS, in terms of sales and commissions, have been those who regularly change the images of their work displayed on the database.

However, there are now a growing number of semi-professional and professional Highlands and Islands artists with no representation through AXIS, many of whom have not signed up due to the cost of the scheme. It is therefore recommended that a second scheme should be adopted in collaboration with AXIS, offering a number of free one-off places on a trial basis to first-time artist members from the Highlands and Islands.

Current developments within the HI~Arts website also offer online opportunities to raise the profile of the region’s visual arts. This website now receives nearly 2000 visitors a week, and so is a key tool through which to develop promotional activities for the sector.

The site’s events guide and forthcoming Highlands and Islands online arts journal are both means by which artists and galleries can raise the profile of their work and exhibitions.

There is also the potential to digitise the Highland Council’s artists register through the proposed development of a HI~Arts online ‘artistes directory’. With additional functionality for displaying images within such a directory, that will be developed as part of a forthcoming crafts digitisation project, there will also be opportunities to provide images of artists’ work alongside an artists’ statement. The register should be expanded to include artists from across the Highlands and Islands region.

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Recommendations

Responsibility

In partnership with the AXIS national artists’ database, the award of a number of free trial places on the database to first-time members from the Highlands and Islands should be explored.

HI~Arts / AXIS

The Highland Council’s artists’ register should be digitised and form the basis of an online database of visual arts practitioners in the region through the new technologies and functionality offered by the HI~Arts website.

Highland Council Exhibition Service / HI~Arts

Highland Arts Through this collaborative initiative and others, such as the Highlands and Islands Visual Arts Guide, the visual arts sector of the Highlands is now seen as a viable industry with a professional approach that is equal to that of other industries. In the long term, it is hoped that initiatives such as these will help to retain talented visual arts professionals in the region.

The Highland Arts project, which was established in 1995 and ran for a total of five years thanks to funding from the Highland Council and the European Regional Development Fund, was a momentous achievement for the Highlands’ visual arts sector. The project actively supported the sustainable economic viability of many of the region’s artists, by representing their work professionally to nationwide visual arts audiences, through both art fair attendance and the curation of major touring exhibitions from the region.

Highland Arts’ approach to professional support and development fits well with Highlands and Islands Enterprise’s approach to growing businesses and developing skills. It is highly recommended that the successes of Highland Arts be built upon now that the pilot project is over, and be broadened to serve the whole of the Highlands and Islands region, to further develop the business potential of the sector.

This should be achieved through the formation of an independent, not-for-profit agency.

To ensure a broad representation from artists across the region within the continued project, it is further recommended that the public galleries already participating in the region’s visual arts consortium become stakeholders for this agency, by acting as board members or a steering group for their work, and as a selection panel for represented artists.

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[ Case Study ]

Highland Arts [ Prom ot io n of High la nd A rt ist s ] Challenge: It was recognised that the business potential of both individual visual arts practitioners, and the visual arts sector as a whole, was underdeveloped in the Highlands. This was primarily due to the inaccessibility of prime visual arts marketplaces to Highland-based artists, a lack of accessible and relevant training and advice in business and promotion for practitioners, and limited coordination for the sector as a whole.

Response: Highland Arts was set up as a pilot project in 1995 by the Highland Council Exhibition Unit, funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) under the Highlands & Islands Objective 1 Programme (1994 to 1999) and by Highland Council. The Exhibitions Unit also contracted Flick Hawkins of Rhue Art (Ullapool) to help deliver the project, who had substantial experience with visual arts promotion through her managerial role to artist husband, James Hawkins.

The objectives of the project were: to link one person visual arts businesses to raise the profile and develop the identity of the region’s visual arts sector locally and nationally to encourage the export of the Highland-based visual arts product to develop the earning power of Highland-based visual arts practitioners and small businesses Highland Arts set out to achieve these goals primarily by idenitifying emerging local artists, and presenting their work professionally at national art fairs, including the London Contemporary Art Fair, the Affordable Art Fair and the Glasgow Art Fair. The origination of these shows, alongside the production of quality brochures representing their stable of artists, was overseen by Highland Arts.

Outcomes:

Throughout the life of the project, between 1995 and 2000, it is estimated that

Highland Arts promoted 185 Highland-based artists through art fair attendance and by originating exhibitions for tour both nationally and internationally (including ‘Counting Sheep’ and ‘River Deep Mountain High’), thus safeguarding their professional practice within the Highland region. Many of the emerging artists represented by the project also benefited by having their work displayed alongside more established and eminent Highlands artists, thus giving credence to their practice.

As a result, many of the artists represented by Highland Arts found more permanent commercial gallery representation and outlets in UK cities. The Highland-based galleries representing these artists were also helped by the project as more demand was created for these artists’ work. Through sustained attendance at major art fairs, Highland Arts has become a recognisable quality ‘brand’.

ERDF funding for the project came to an end in 2000.

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The agency would research into the most appropriate national and international arts fairs for the artists that they represent, and put together strong applications for stands at art fairs. As well as presenting emerging artists’ work at art fairs and creating professional print material on their featured artists, the agency would adopt a ‘grooming’ role for their stable of artists, offering advice on the presentation and pricing of work, contracts, portfolios, and other aspects of professional practice.

It is anticipated that such an agency will be able to work with up to a dozen artists simultaneously, although an objective of the agency will be to place artists with national and international commercial galleries in their own right, thereby creating vacancies within the agency for work with new artists.

However, there should also be benefits of the project to the wider visual arts practitioners in the region. To this effect, it is recommended that the agency establishes a contractual obligation with the artists that it represents to provide a mentoring and training role to the next generation of emerging artists in their areas, in order to invest the benefit of their experience back into the region’s developing visual arts sector. In this way, the agency will fulfill a supportive role locally, and be closely allied with the public gallery network.

Initial start-up funding will be required to establish such an agency, to recruit emerging artists to the scheme, and to undertake the required research into appropriate art fairs for the agency to participate in. However, through the commissions on work sold at fairs, Highland Arts were able to break even or even generate a profit through attendance at art fairs and, in this way, it is foreseeable that the work of this agency may become financially self-sustaining over time. The agency would source funding for their activities through key agencies and trusts, including Highlands and Islands Enterprise and Scottish Arts Council.

Of course, such an agency will need a name that is representative of the whole region, rather than just the Highlands. However, having already established the Highland Arts brand with the art-buying public, it is recommended that the new agency be a recognisable reincarnation of the previous project. In this respect, it may be of benefit for this agency to take on the branding developed by the ‘Highlands and Islands Visual Arts’ Guide, which would also associate this agency with this successful publication.

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Visual Arts Forum The annual Highlands and Islands Visual Arts Forum has become increasingly popular, and offers many otherwise isolated artists opportunities to receive information and advice from trainers, to ask questions of key agencies, and to share the challenges and opportunities of working in the rural Highlands and Islands. It is possibly most important as a rare networking opportunity and a chance for artists to meet their peers.

Held in January 2002 by HI~Arts and the Highland Council, the last forum was the bestattended to date, with 74 delegates present, and another 15 on the waiting list for the event.

However, the siting of the forum in and around the Inverness area has limited attendance from many of the islands and areas such as Argyll, even with the availability of travel bursaries from HI~Arts.

Given the rising attendance at the Visual Arts Forum, it is recommended that the potential for holding a number of more localised fora across the region be explored. There is also the possibility of collaboration with the aforementioned agency on the event’s delivery, whose represented artists may be able to play a mentoring role at fora.

Recommendations

Responsibility

A not-for-profit visual arts agency should be established to continue the work of Highland Arts, by presenting the work of emerging Highlands and Islands artists at national and international art fairs.

The potential to deliver the popular annual Highlands and Islands Visual Arts Forum at a local level should be explored.

Highland Arts / Visual Arts Consortium

HI~Arts

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S e c t i o n

F i v e :

[ Sector Marketing Development ] This section explores the wider cross-sector promotional activities that have been and can be undertaken to raise the profile of the visual arts of the Highlands and Islands, both within and out with the region.

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Part One: [ Pr of il e ] The establishment and promotion of the visual arts as a viable sector in the Highlands and Islands has obvious benefits. As a recognised and sustainable sector with the potential to support many jobs and to generate income for the region, it is more likely to attract inward investment at all levels from local and national agencies, whilst establishing greater recognition and acceptance from local communities.

In addition, a cohesive and well-coordinated visual arts sector that is a sum of its consistuent parts, can also achieve more in terms of raising its profile at a national and international level, thereby establishing an export market for its artistic product and skills, whilst encouraging additional niche and cultural tourism to the Highlands and Islands.

A number of cross-sector initiatives have already been undertaken that help to establish this holistic view of an otherwise dispersed sector.

Highlands and Islands Visual Arts Guide The first edition of the Highlands and Islands Visual Arts Guide was published in 1999 through funding from Highlands and Islands Enterprise and the Scottish Arts Council. It proved so popular with local and touring visual arts audiences, and with the galleries represented in the Guide, that a subsequent edition was published in 2001.

It is highly recommended that the biennial publication of the Visual Arts Guide is continued. However, with current costs of producting the Guide at over £11,000, alongside £3,500 distribution costs over two years and given the unlikelihood of receiving substantial further financial support from past funders, it is inevitable that the funds for future publications will need to be sought through private sources and sponsorship.

However, given that the Guide is now well-established and has a proven record of success, it is more likely that revenue can be secured both from galleries featured within the Guide, and from private sponsorship. Therefore, as part of HI~Arts’ Audience Development Project, sponsorship for a third edition of the Guide will be sought in 2003.

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[ Case Study ]

Highlands and Islands Visual Arts Guide The Guide: In a collaborative project initiated by HI~Arts, a Highlands and Islands Visual Arts Guide publication was produced. The aims of the Guide were to raise awareness of the scale, diversity and quality of the visual arts sector of the Highlands and Islands both internally and externally, to cross-promote the area’s many galleries to current gallery attenders, and to encourage the many visitors to the area to attend galleries and go on ‘gallery trails’.

The first edition of the free Guide was published in 1999, and 35,000 copies were distributed over two years through the region’s galleries, arts centres, visitor attractions, and at key arts venues and tourist centres in the Central Belt.

Freepost feedback forms in every Guide were used to monitor audience reaction to the publication and to collect customer data with which to promote future visual arts events. In addition, readers were able to request to join the mailing list of up to four galleries represented in the Guide.

Visual Arts Guides 1999-2000 (top) 2001-2002 (below)

The publication was funded by the Scottish Arts Council Audience and Sales Development Unit, Highlands and Islands Enterprise and HI~Arts.

Outcomes: Due to overwhelmingly positive feedback from visual arts audiences and participating galleries, a second edition was published in 2001 as part of the Visual Arts Marketing Project. At this time, the Guide was also made available to download from the HI~Arts website in sections divided by geographical area. The most popular section of the online Guide has been Orkney with 200 downloads. In all, the online Guide has accounted for 1,500 downloads from the site in 2001.

94% of respondents returning Guide feedback forms (nearly 300 individuals) have asked to receive future editions of the Guide, and a further 39% have submitted their email address to receive information. The most requests received for further gallery information were for art.tm, The Ceilidh Place (Ullapool), Kilmorack Gallery, Pier Arts Centre, and An Tuireann.

According to the feedback forms received, the average age of Guide reader is 44, although the ages ranged from 15 to 79 years, and the majority of readers (64%) are female. Readership is split evenly between visitors to the region and local audiences. Respondents had spent over £31,000 between them (or an average of £103 each) on artwork found at galleries within the Guide.

There have also been unforeseen benefits of the Guide, most notable for local visual arts practitioners who use the publication to source potential outlets for their work.

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In addition to a published Visual Arts Guide, it is further recommended that an online dynamic version of the Guide be produced. This would also ensure the continued ‘virtual’ presence of a Guide, should funding not be secured for a further publication in 2003.

The online Guide would be fully searchable by region, and could be integrated into HI~Arts’ online events guide, which would enable browsers to view not only the regions galleries, but also any current exhibitions that were being held in those galleries. An online Guide could also be updated regularly to include new galleries and studios as they develop.

Furthermore, the costs involved in establishing such a service would be small in comparison to the publication.

There are further opportunities to provide similar cross-region approaches to the promotion of artists’ studio and workshop facilities in the Highlands and Islands, and these should also be established online and in hard copy as a resource for both local practitioners and artists visiting the area.

Recommendations

Responsibility

Funding should be sought for a third edition of the Highlands and Islands Visual Arts Guide publication in 2003.

Audience Development Project

An online dynamic version of the Visual Arts Guide should be established.

Audience Development Project

Information on artists’ studios and workshop facilities of the region should be promoted both online and in hard copy.

HI~Arts / Audience Development Project

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Media Profile An objective of the Visual Arts Marketing Project was the development of media coverage for the visual arts of the Highlands and Islands. It was suggested that this could be achieved through the development of a visual arts festival for the region, to collectively raise the profile of the sector.

Whilst a visual arts festival would serve this purpose, little appetite exists for the development of a purely visual arts-based festival on the ground or within artistic communities, as it is felt that the Highlands and Islands are too large a geographic area to make a visible and effective impact with such a project. However, a number of arts festivals across the area have not developed visual arts aspects to their programmes, and it is felt that greater potential exists for the development of the visual arts within existing regional festivals, and this is the preferred option amongst regional galleries.

As an alternative method of raising media coverage of the area’s visual arts, a press familiarisation tour was conducted during the marketing project, which successfully brought a number of national and arts journalists to a number of visual arts centres in Inverness, Skye and the Western Isles. Additional funding has already been secured for a second tour, this time to the northern Highlands, the Orkney and Shetland Isles. This tour will be conducted in autumn 2002.

Finally, it is recommended that the centralised distribution of exhibition listings to the national media be explored as an addition to HI~Arts current online listings services.

Recommendations

Responsibility

Key agencies and galleries should play an advocacy and facilitating role for the inclusion of visual arts in established arts festivals of the Highlands and Islands.

HI~Arts / Visual Arts Consortium

A second press familiarisation tour of the Highlands and Islands will be carried out in Autumn 2002 to visual arts venues in the Northern Highlands and the Northern Isles.

Audience Development Project

Central and coordinated distribution of exhibition listings to the national media and listings press should be explored.

Audience Development Project

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[ Case Study ]

Highlands and Islands Media Familiarisation Tour Challenge: The visual arts of the Highlands and Islands have a low profile in the national and arts media. Travel budgets for national media arts coverage often do not allow reviewers to cover exhibitions at venues in the far north of Scotland and the Isles. In addition, as many arts journalists are not familiar with the relatively new gallery developments in the Highlands and Islands, there is limited A feature from [AN] Magazine generated by the tour

knowledge of the scale or standard of provision for the visual arts of the region.

Response: In November 2001, as part of the Visual Arts Marketing Project, a media familiarisation tour of the area’s visual arts venues was coordinated for national and arts press.

The tour was designed to optimise the coverage of the area’s visual arts by visiting a number of galleries in one trip, and to minimise the costs and administration for participating journalists by taking advantage of group travel discounts and coordinating the tour on their behalf.

Key national and arts journalists were recruited to the three day tour, which visited eight galleries – both public and private – in Inverness, the Isle of Skye and the Western Isles.

Outcomes: Media coverage generated by the tour included two prime time BBC Radio Scotland slots, two national television news items, one full-page article in [AN] Magazine, and exhibition reviews in the national press. The tour represented a welcome opportunity for the journalists, some of whom had never visited the centres or areas covered in the tour before.

However, perhaps more importantly, the centres visited on the tour, and indeed other galleries in the region, have retained contact with these key media members and generated additional media coverage for their work.

The strategic aims of the tour corresponded well to those of Highlands and Island Enterprise, the Highlands of Scotland Tourist Board and Western Isles Tourist Board, all of whom financially supported the tour. The costs of the tour were

Press members hear about visual arts developments at Skye’s Gaelic College, Sabhal Mor Ostaig, from Donnie Munro

negligible in comparison to the editorial coverage that it stimulated in the national press.

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Part Two: [ The B igg er P ict ur e ] National and International Links A number of public galleries in the Highlands and Islands have already established international links. For instance, Bonhoga Gallery has organised exhibitions of Shetland artists’ work in Scandinavia, An Lanntair toured their ‘From the Land’ exhibition extensively in Canada, and An Tuireann are currently collaborating on projects with an Irish gallery. Furthermore, the aforementioned independent artists’ agency will further develop networks and promote the region’s visual arts both nationally and internationally.

Between them, the public galleries of the visual arts consortium are well-placed to develop a range of international contacts. To this effect, a coordinated approach to this international networking could be adopted here, with each public gallery developing links with overseas visual arts organisations on behalf of the whole consortium, potentially through a scheme of ‘partnership’ or ‘twinning’ with overseas galleries.

In addition to international links, there are also benefits to developing a closer relationship with public galleries in other parts of the UK. Given the relatively low turnover and geographic isolation of key gallery staff, especially on the islands, there may also be opportunities to develop short exchange schemes for certain artistic directors, potentially in the role of ‘guest curator’, within other UK galleries.

Prestige Over the next few years, there is huge potential to develop the profile and prestige of the visual arts in the Highlands and Islands. There are opportunities to work more closely with the National Galleries of Scotland to address a number of gaps in provision. The extension of this key agency’s work to the Highlands and Islands will also help to raise local advocacy and the perceived prestige of the sector.

The InvernessHighland bid to become ‘Capital of Culture’ in 2008 also raises ambitions for the sector, and one aim of the bid is to secure a major national gallery with a permanent collection as a central resource for the area by 2008. There is no reason why further ambitious projects, such as a national art fair for the region, should not follow.

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S e c t i o n

S i x :

[ Executive Summary ] This section summarises the main findings of the report, and presents a recommended exit strategy for the Visual Arts Marketing Project.

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Part One: [ C oncl us i on s ] •

There is an absence of a tradition of gallery-going and art purchasing across the Highland and Islands, and therefore the visual arts of the region are in their infancy.

•

The visual arts of the region is now a growing sector, characterised by numerous ‘micro-businesses’. These galleries and studios currently attract over 600,000 visits per year.

•

The tourist market is extremely important for the visual arts sector, and accounts for two-thirds of attendances at the region’s galleries. However, this audience is seasonal, which leads to huge fluctuations in attendance levels across the year.

•

Small local catchment populations mean that the region’s public galleries cannot rely on ‘niche’ audiences for their work, and must become more inclusive to a wider local constituency.

•

Word of mouth is the most powerful marketing tool in the rural communities of the Highlands and Islands, and it is essential for public galleries to establish local advocacy for their work.

•

Regional public galleries have been able to involve first-time local audiences in the contemporary visual arts by creating an otherwise-missing context for this work.

This context has been established through local culture and heritage, more familiar media such as photography, and a supportive educational ‘product surround’.

•

Organisations that have embarked upon avant garde programming without this support or context have lost local support for their work.

•

In terms of statistics, the rural public galleries of the Highlands and Islands have a greater success rate at local market penetration than their urban counterparts.

•

The lack of staff with specific responsibility for education in a number of public galleries, has limited their potential to develop partnerships with schools.

•

Good practice exists across public sector galleries in terms of the marketing that is intrinsic to their programming and project work. However, extrinsic marketing

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practices (such as branding, generic publicity material, press relations and distribution) are underdeveloped.

•

Likewise, research and monitoring practices across the sector are somewhat informal.

•

Opportunities for closer collaboration between visual arts consortium members exist in a number of areas – most notably in retail development and local artist support.

•

Given little tradition for original artwork purchases in the Highlands and Islands, the visual arts sector must work to establish local access to purchases, potentially through an interest-free ‘purchase loan’ scheme.

•

The relationship between not-for-profit galleries and the artists within their local communities is underdeveloped and strained in some areas, and a significant number of artists feel that these galleries should be doing more to support and develop local artistic practice and promotion.

•

Projects such as Highland Arts and the Highlands and Islands Visual Arts Guide have been key factors in raising the profile and prestige of the area’s visual arts as a cohesive and professional sector.

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Part Two: [ Exit Strategy ] [ Visu al Ar ts Ma r k e t i ng P r oje ct Mo n i tor i ng & E v al u at i o n ] Recommendations

Responsibility

Advice and support for the implementation and monitoring of marketing plans will now be ‘mainstreamed’ through the local network of HIE-Marks Marketing Advisors.

HIE-Marks

HI~Arts have committed to evaluating the impact of the Visual Arts Marketing Project one year after its end, in August 2003.

HI~Arts

The visual arts consortium should continue to meet in order to develop the recommendations of the report.

Visual Arts Consorium / HI~Arts

[ Cr oss -sector Mar ke t i n g I n i t ia t iv e s ] Recommendations

Responsibility

Funding should be sought for a third edition of the Highlands and Islands Visual Arts Guide publication in 2003.

Audience Development Project

An online dynamic version of the Visual Arts Guide should be established.

Audience Development Project

Key agencies and galleries should play an advocacy and facilitating role for the inclusion of visual arts in established arts festivals of the Highlands and Islands.

HI~Arts / Visual Arts Consortium

A second press familiarisation tour of the Highlands and Islands will be carried out in Autumn 2002 to visual arts venues in the Northern Highlands and the Northern Isles.

Audience Development Project

Central and coordinated distribution of exhibition listings to the national media and listings press should be explored.

Audience Development Project

The region’s public galleries should extend the benefits of their respective Friends and membership schemes to all other visual arts consortium galleries’ members.

Visual Arts Consortium

A retail consortium should be established to maximise attendance at key national craft and gift trade fairs, and to explore other retailing initiatives such as the commissioning of designer stock and acceptance of the Euro.

Visual Arts Consortium

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[ Art i s t Supp ort an d P r omo t io n ] Recommendations

Responsibility

Art.tm should broaden its key role as an information provider for the visual arts sector by coordinating the production of a quarterly local artists’ newsletter for distribution through consortium galleries.

art.tm / Visual Arts Consortium

The online forum for Highlands and Islands visual artists should continue, and the role for managing this forum should be taken on by art.tm.

art.tm

In partnership with the AXIS national artists’ database, the award of a number of free trial places on the database to first-time members from the Highlands and Islands should be explored.

HI~Arts / AXIS

The Highland Council’s artists’ register should be digitised and form the basis of an online database of visual arts practitioners in the region through the new technologies and functionality offered by the HI~Arts website.

Highland Council Exhibition Service / HI~Arts

A not-for-profit visual arts agency should be established to continue the work of Highland Arts, by presenting the work of emerging Highlands and Islands artists at national and international art fairs.

Highland Arts / Visual Arts Consortium

The potential to deliver the popular annual Highlands and Islands Visual Arts Forum at a local level should be explored.

Information on artists’ studios and workshop facilities of the region should be promoted both online and in hard copy.

HI~Arts

HI~Arts / Audience Development Project

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S e c t i o n

S e v e n :

[ Appendices ]

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Part One: [ R ef e r e n c e & Re la ted R ea d i n g ] All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture & Education (Report to the Secretary of State for Education and Employment and the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport), National Advisory Committee on Creativity and Cultural Education, DfEE Publications, 1999 Building Bridges – Guidance for Museums and Galleries on Developing New Audiences, Jocelyn Dodd and Richard Sandell, Museums and Galleries Commission, 1998

By Popular Demand – A Strategic Analysis of the Market Potential for Museums and Art Galleries in the UK, Dr Stuart Davies, Museums and Galleries Commission, 1994 Crossing the Line – Extending Young People’s Access to Cultural Venues, John Harland & Kay Kinder (Editors), Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 1999 The Economic and Social Impact of the Arts in the Highlands and Islands (Report), Independent Northern Consultants, September 2001 Marketing the Visual Arts – Challenge and Response, Professor Leslie W. Rodger, Scottish Arts Council Publications, 1987 On the Edge – Culture and the Arts in Remote and Rural Locations, Professor Anne Douglas (Editor) et al, RGU Faculty of Design, Gray’s School of Art, 2000 The Scottish Abstract of Statistics, Government Statistical Service, 1998 Scottish Arts Council Audience and Sales Development Overview, Tim Baker and Heather Maitland, 2002 Selling the Contemporary Visual Arts, Gerri Morris, Report for the North West Arts Board and the Arts Council of England, 1991 Social Trends 30, Government Statistical Service, 2000 To Sell Art, Know Your Market (A Survey of Visual Arts and Fine Craft Buyers), Australia Council, 199X

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Part Two: [ Cred its ]

I am grateful to all the staff at HI~Arts for providing encouragement and administrative support throughout the project, to the hard-working staff and board members of the residency organisations, who never failed to be welcoming and facilitating throughout, and to the many artists and arts administrators that I met during the project, who all gave their time so generously.

Marcus J Wilson 31 July 2002

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