For those of you not in the know, AOH is an opportunity for Brighton artists to let the public see and buy their work not through a gallery or shop, but in their very own homes. Each may approximately 200 houses in and around Brighton are turned into galleries hosting everything from oil paintings to Tuscan earthen ware to performance art. It's a truly democratic way of getting your work in front of the viewing and buying public. People come from near and far to walk the dozen or so trails, visiting each house in turn.
Admittedly, a lot of people just like snooping around other peoples' homes. But many come year in and year out to see their favourite artist/s. And it's not all amateurs. There are many seasoned professionals who use AOH to launch new work.
Last year, we opened our house up for the first time. We're photographers, so we created an exhibit of our recent work, and we chose to base the work on a theme, "Up Close & Personal" (see it here). We shifted pretty much every item of furniture out of the lounge, painted the walls white, and hung about 25 pictures on the wall, all mounted the same. It looked impressive. The upstairs spare bedroom, however, looked like a landfill site! And we had to live like that for a month. But, we sold pictures and we even took a booking to shoot a wedding. By the time the last visitor left the house on Sunday of the last weekend, we'd clocked over 1200 people coming through our always-open front door!
So this year, we're back.
We've had to squeeze our budget and therefore we're about to embark on mounting our photographs ourselves. We've got shedloads of black foamboard turning up, and about 40 or so various sized prints. Oh, and lots of Spray Mount, scalpels, Velcro, and tissue paper. Tip : if you want to save money, do it yourself!
We've got a new theme this year, "Killing Time and Other Things...", and despite the fact that we've had nowhere near as much time to produce pictures as we did last year, we're pretty stoked with what we've come up with. It's a radical departure from last year's work (we had quite a few body parts shots and portraits) but I think that's a good thing.
I'm off to pick up the photographs today. All £300 of them..
