Bloomberg New Contemporaries at Spike Island

So Spike Island has a new exhibition that starts tomorrow (13th September) and goes on until 10th November. It's called Bloomberg New Contemporaries, and it's been going on since the late 80s under its current name (other connected annual stuff has been going on since the late 40s, so it's pretty long-running). Once it's finished in Bristol, the exhibition is heading for London's ICA.

I'm gonna be volunteering to be at the gallery for a few days while the exhibition is on, and today, all the volunteers and invigilators were invited to come and meet some of the staff at Spike Island, have a tour of the upstairs studio spaces and look at the exhibition before the public, to get an idea of what it's like. One studio in the building has 24-hour access, which I thought was pretty amazing. Nobody was working in the studios that we saw, but they still all looked really interesting and artsy.

Because of how BNC works, there's no real bias involved - anyone studying fine art who a) graduated last year, b) is a postgraduate or c) is in their final year, can apply for their work to be featured. When they select works to go in, the art is chosen purely by looking at photographs of it. The people choosing the art don't get to know the person's name, gender or age until they've been confirmed.

Everyone who works at Spike Island is really nice; they explained everything really clearly and gave us lots of time to go round looking at the art by ourselves before being told the details of some of the pieces. All the volunteers got given a free copy of the Bloomberg New Contemporaries catalogue, which has full-page photos in & is super nice aesthetically. You can buy copies from the main desk at Spike Island.

I could've got some of this wrong, because I was getting really tired towards the end and I knew I still had to do a half-hour's walk back to the station, but as far as I can remember, this is what they said.

You might think it'd all be conceptual work, or that because the artists are graduates or still studying, the work won't be very good quality, but there's a huge range of great art available to look at, and some of the big names in art were featured in Bloomberg New Contemporaries once (David Hockney and Damien Hirst, for example) so it's worth a look.

- Alice