This week, we’ve been having Christmas dos in various places and catch up with people who’ve made our first year developing Art and Energy so rewarding and exciting.
We’ve also been thinking about next year and planning what to do and how to do it.
Art and Energy has been the name we’ve been using throughout 2018 and because we’ll be doing more public-facing work in the coming year, we wanted to check in with our friends to see whether or not this is the name we should continue to use in the future.
We like Art and Energy – because it sort of says what we’re about, but a fair few people have said that it’s been difficult to find us online. There are a number of ways to sort that out – not least, doing some SEO work – but, it may be that we should have a new/different name.
Some questions we’re thinking about are:
- What words do we associate with Art and Energy?
- If Art and Energy was an animal, plant, person, place, vehicle what would we be and why?
- What are our values?
This year so far been rather wild!
At the beginning of the year, Naomi and I had an idea – more or less scrawled out on a hodge-podge powerpoint and it felt really amazing to have the support an validation that came from Exeter City Futures Velocities Programme to help us develop from that starting point.
Over the course of the year, we
- tested our materials and processes with the help of the Fab Lab in Plymouth, the renewable energy department at the University of Exeter and LaserCutz in Honiton with successful and surprising results
- ran workshops and events with over 300 people across the year with ‘Pretty Useful sessions’ at Plymouth Energy Community, TRESOC, The Energy Society Conference through Art Week Exeter and in a public consultation in Princesshay
- figured out what our supply chain could be to actually produce solar panel artworks
- and helped six 7-11 year olds to earn their green Blue Peter badges by making their own solar panel artworks.
We’ve told the story of what we’re trying to do all over the place and at one lucky event – The Like Minds festival with support from Set Squared, we met Chris Moss who generously offered to help us think about our branding options and the next steps for our future hence this blog post and this gathering.
Over the coming year, we’re looking forward to exhibiting our first solar panel artworks at events and places across the UK and we’ll announce the dates in the early part of 2019.
We’re also planning to deliver a number of ‘Make Your Own Solar Panel Artwork’ workshops which we’ll share the dates for too.