Seeing Things, a visual arts exhibition showcasing the work of nine artists based in the North West, curated by artist Matthew Wood. The free exhibition is open until 29th February at The Edge, Wigan.
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00:00 Hi I'm Matthew Wood, an artist and curator of Seeing Things here at The Edge.
00:04 We are open from the 20th to the 29th of February with some great kids workshops,
00:12 live drawing, all free of charge and open to all.
00:17 So I'm Anna F. C. Smith and I'm an artist from Wigan and I'm one of the nine
00:22 artists that are part of this Seeing Things exhibition at The Edge. I was
00:28 approached by Matt alongside another artist called Claire Doyle really early
00:33 on in this project when we'd kind of like been given the opportunity to
00:37 potentially use this amazing space for an exhibition. So me and Claire and Matt
00:42 worked together to create, and with some of the help from other people, to get an
00:46 Arts Council bid and to support more artists in the area to kind of come
00:52 together for this exhibition. So my work in the show is this long river thing
00:57 that you can kind of see behind me. It would have been an idea to kind of
01:02 work around the River Douglas and ideas about loss and stuff like that for a
01:06 little while, but having the opportunity to work in this exhibition space with
01:10 the length of it and the scale, the height of it, just allowed me to kind of
01:14 create something that was really kind of unique and stretched out, a lot bigger
01:20 than something I would normally do and a lot kind of like longer and thinner.
01:22 It's got a very, it's very sight responsive in terms of its form and the
01:28 river is running right next to the edge as well, so it's kind of like this flows
01:31 here and then that's flowing outside, so there's a nice kind of like link
01:34 together with the two pieces. In terms of like having artwork in a show like this,
01:38 it's just, it feels really important, one, to show that artists can kind of have
01:45 career in Wigan, can make artwork that's unusual in a place like Wigan, and also
01:50 that we can kind of create those networks together, so we've got artists
01:54 from Preston and Manchester and Liverpool as well as Wigan and Leigh in
01:57 this exhibition and the network that we've created through training sessions
02:03 together and doing things throughout this project has meant that we've got
02:07 like a platform that we can kind of like jump from, so the next time you
02:11 want to do a show, we've got people we can speak to, kind of like in groups of
02:16 people who we can kind of like bounce ideas off and work with each other and
02:20 hopefully it's inspiring to like any artists who are coming up now from
02:24 college or whatever that the career in Wigan or in the Northwest is completely feasible.