For this toolkit, Zoe Lippett, Exhibitions and Artists' Projects Curator at The New Art Gallery Walsall, joins Ruth Claxton, Associate Director at Eastside Projects, to talk about what makes a successful artist website.
As a curator, Zoe frequently looks to artist websites as a way of researching artists' practices, and encounters an array of styles and functions, ranging from the informative and useful to the confusing and frustrating.
Zoe will consider a variety of existing artists’ websites to illustrate the different ways artists use websites as a way of sharing and expressing their practice. We'll consider the purpose of websites, whether as archive, artwork in itself or promotion tool, and hear how each of these requires a different approach to design and content.
We won’t be looking at the technical details of what it takes to build a website, but will think more broadly about why you might have a website and how it might be used to effectively communicate your practice. We’ll look at a range of formats and strategies to think about how to make this mode of presentation helpful rather hindering, and how to balance artistic and aesthetic considerations with the need to be practical and informative.
Zoe Lippett is a curator and art writer. She works as Exhibitions and Artists’ Projects Curator at The New Art Gallery Walsall where she curates a varied programme of exhibitions, artist projects and residencies. Recent exhibitions include Eva Rothschild: Alternative to Power, 2016; FOUND, 2015 (Paul Chiappe, Ruth Claxton, Julie Cockburn, Ellen Gallagher, Erik Kessels, Vesna Pavlovic, John Stezaker) and Noemie Goudal: The Geometrical Determination of the Sunrise, 2014 (touring to Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam in 2015). Forthcoming projects include a solo exhibition by ESP member, Andrew Gillespie, opening February 2017. Her catalogue essay on the early work of soft sculpture pioneer, Jann Haworth will be published by Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg to coincide with the exhibition This Was Tomorrow (30 October 2016 - 19 February 2017), the first exhibition in Germany to comprehensively deal with the birth and evolution of Pop Art in Great Britain.
