Elaine has filled everyone in with some background about the Artists Open Houses, now I’m going to talk a bit about the genesis of HOUSE, the partner festival to the Open Houses which we piloted last May

There were three main factors that led to us adding a new visual arts festival to Brighton’s cultural offer during the festival season.

First of all: we had become aware of artists creating really exciting and dynamic work in studios throughout the city, who for various reasons didn’t show their work within the Open Houses. Sometimes this was because they were working in media such as video, sound installations, or large sculptures that could not be easily accommodated by the Open House format, sometimes simply that the work wasn’t necessarily for sale.

Secondly: historically, Brighton Festival has been primarily about performance, theatre and music, whereas the visual arts have been somewhat under represented. We wanted to enable people living in and visiting Brighton and Hove to have the opportunity to experience and engage with the cutting edge of contemporary visual arts.

Thirdly: unlike a growing number of towns and cities along the South coast and elsewhere in the country, Brighton does not have a large dedicated contemporary art gallery.

HOUSE makes a virtue of the lack of a major gallery, by utilising small gallery and domestic spaces thoughout the city. HOUSE aims to draw the attention of some of the huge open house audience to these small galleries, which are showing serious and exciting work, but which often go unnoticed by the majority of local people.

Last year’s pilot festival brought together for the first time, top curators from the city and the region, all of whom were excited and stimulated by the idea of curating interesting and unusual spaces, rather then the traditional white gallery cube.

Artists similarly responded to the history and environment of venues by creating work inspired and informed by the domestic.

Some HOUSE curators were keen to work with spaces within the Open Houses themselves, for instance curating small interventions on a mantle-piece or in an under-stairs cupboard. One curator converted an Open House’s living room into a mini cinema, containing seven traditional red velvet cinema seats, showing an international programme of films created from home movie footage.

This year’s festival will be called HOUSE Gallery and will comprise a number of projects or ‘gallery rooms’, spread across locations throughout the city.

A gallery plan will show visitors where each room of the gallery is located and we will be looking for business partners to act as sponsors, for example for a gallery café and a gallery bar. We are delighted that Castor and Pollux, on the seafront, are already working with us to provide the gallery shop. Each of these venues will be clearly marked on the gallery plan as well as being given advertorial space within the brochure.

We are looking for partners to act as patrons or sponsors in a variety of different ways for each of the individual exhibitions within HOUSE Gallery. Each project is unique and we will work with partners to find ways that best suit their needs.

This year’s HOUSE projects include a show at Wellington House, a council-run day-care centre where a respected curator will be working alongside and mentoring an artist with learning disabilities, to help curate a show of work by six award winning marginalised arts with learning or other disabilities.

At Preston Manor, ten artists working at the radical interface of fine art and craft, will each be creating site-specific interventions to place among the museums permanent collection; each being inspired by the history, architecture and domestic aspects of the manor house.

Artist Nigel Shafran is creating an audio visual work, recording the sites and sounds of parked up bicycles, by filming and ringing the bells of the bikes he encounters whilst walking several of the Open House trails. The resultant sound installations will be played in Open Houses and the films shown downstairs at The Regency Town House. His piece also reflects Brighton’s reputation as a cycling city: Brighton and Hove has been selected as a national exemplar of a cycling town for 2009 -11, during which Brighton and Hove council are promoting cycling as a healthy and environmentally friendly way to travel. In addition, as a part of this work there will be cycle shed structure, appearing overnight on a parking space, which will act as part bike museum and art gallery and part bike information centre.

The Phoenix Studios gallery will be inverting the concept of the Open Houses by taking visitors on a voyeuristic tour of a home, which has been inserted into a public gallery space. The Phoenix artists, including painters, sculptors, animators and photographers will create a labyrinth of hallways, rooms, wardrobes and hidden spaces, where visitors will catch glimpses of the private lives of its inhabitants. The spaces will evoke a range feelings associated with the notions of ‘home’, such as comfort, nostalgia, secrets and discovery.

Upstairs at The Regency Town House, we will be repeating last year’s really popular exhibition: HOUSE Open, showing highlights of this years Open House Artists work.

The work will be selected by three prestigious local curators, from Brighton Museum, Pallant House Chichester and the Permanent Galley and Photo Fringe.

We are really grateful to Spectrum Photographic for their generous sponsorship of this show and also to Andrew Comben and Brighton festival.

VisitBrighton have been tremendously supportive and encouraging thoughout, but most particularly we’re grateful for their sponsorship of the Phoenix Studios’ artist led tours, where visitors have the opportunity to meet artists at work in their studios and to discuss the artists’ working practices with them.

Last year’s visitor response to these tours was extremely enthusiastic, with visitor feedback telling us that seeing artists at work and talking to them in their studios had: Changed the way I think about art

Provided a: Fascinating insight into how artists develop ideas into work

And: I learnt about a new culture

The Arts Council are supportive of our aims for the future, but we have yet to hear if, and by how much, they will be funding HOUSE this year. Brighton and Hove City Council have generously agreed to provide matched funding should we be successful with our current application – and we are very grateful to Brighton and Hove City Council for their continued encouragement.

However looking to the future, HOUSE Gallery aims to increase its links with business in both partnership and support in order to secure the festival’s continuing success. We are aware that the cultural industries are one of the fastest growing sectors in the country and believe that Brighton, as a city with a uniquely vibrant arts culture, should be a part of this growth.

The response to Anish Kapoor’s work during last year’s Brighton Festival, demonstrated the massive appetite there is in the city to see challenging and stimulating works of art.

In 1910, the first Post Impressionist exhibition in the country was held at Brighton Museum – then an art gallery. It showed work by leading artists such as Cezanne, Matisse and Derain. Surely it’s time for Brighton to regain its place at the forefront of the visual arts and as a champion of the new.

I’m sure we are all too aware that grant and other government funding is increasingly likely to be less readily available in the coming years. For this reason, business partnership with the arts is now vital, in order to sustain the creative vibrancy that makes Brighton the city that it is.

We have a strong vision for the future of HOUSE festival and are already engaged in forward planning. We see the festival as an opportunity to showcase the great visual arts creativity we already have here within the city, but also plan to invite one or two nationally and internationally regarded artists, particularly those with a connection to the city, to headline the festival.

In order to give ourselves time to plan adequately, both artistically and financially, we intend to make HOUSE a biennial festival in the future and are really excited to be working already with David Batchelor, an artist, highly regarded both here and abroad, for 2012.

We highly value your support in helping to take our project forward and to help make HOUSE festival not only a model to be replicated by cities nationwide, but a nationally recognised and respected event – an important fixture in the UK’s visual arts calendar. With your help we believe that together we can achieve this.

MyHotel, 10 March 2010