As part of an ongoing series of interviews with creative societies and groups on campus, Impact Arts spoke with Flo Sandford-Richardson, director of the creative group Crop Up Gallery which is based in Humanities on University Park Campus, to find out more about their group.
So, what is your group about, and what do you do?
Crop Up is a student-run curatorial group based at the University of Nottingham. What that essentially means is that we are a group of students who work with local artists in Nottingham, either from Nottingham Trent or further afield, and exhibit their work in private or professional institutions. At the exhibitions we try to run a sort of public programme to support the show, hosting artist talks and public events in the evenings.
We have a variety of roles within the team, such as Curation, Social Media, Photography, Events, PR and Graphics, and give students real work experience in the art world. Within the last year we have also started running fundraising events to raise money to support our exhibitions. The last event we did was an arts festival at the Hockley Arts Club, and hopefully we will be doing something similar again this year!
What kind of things do you get up to throughout the year?
Each year we aim to do one big exhibition, maybe one small exhibition and one fundraising event. It may not sound like a lot, but this is because of the amount of work that our team puts into each exhibition!
Anything that we should be looking forwards to seeing from Crop Up throughout the year?
Yes, our next exhibition will be at Backlit Gallery at the beginning of February. We will be working with the current students at Nottingham Trent for this one and it is looking to be really amazing. We will also have our fundraising event sometime in April.
How can people get involved with Crop Up?
The main way that students find out about us is at Futures Festival at the beginning of the year as we are classified as a ‘group’ rather than a ‘society’, but we post all of the application information up on our Facebook page when we are looking for new members.
This year we hosted a ‘meet and greet’ at Pepper Rocks before students applied, so that they could come and meet the team and ask any questions. We ask students for a copy of their C.V and a brief cover letter explaining what role they are applying for and what they can bring to the team. We then interview all of the candidates that make it through the first round and take on about ten new students a year from that.
Can you describe Crop Up in three words?
Creative, fun, collaborative.
Ellen Smithies
Image credit: Adam via Flickr.
For more information on Crop Up Gallery, see here.
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