Taking Forward Light Bite Nottingham 2011
Who were our Light Bite Artists?
The success of OpenFridge depends on our growing band of enthusiastic magnetic artists. 117 people took part in Light Bite Nottingham, contributing 255 works in total.
OpenFridge attracted a wide range of people from many different walks of life:
l 39% were male and 61% were female.
l 89% were UK-based, 4% from Europe and 7% from further afield.
l Of our adult artists, a third (33%) were aged 16-35, a half (48%) aged 36-55 and a fifth (20%) aged over 55.
l The show included one primary school, including 12 works by 5-6 year olds.
l Most (66%) were new to OpenFridge, while 34% had taken part in a magnet show before.
l 83% had submitted work to open exhibitions before, making LightBite the first open exhibition for 17% of artists.
(All figures in this section based on information drawn from our list of artists or people filling out our feedback survey)
Information and networking?
How did artists hear about LightBite? Most heard about it directly from Alban (45%) or someone else they knew (9%), via Artists Newsletter (30%) or Isendyouthis.com (14%). 82% had passed on information about the show to others.
Website traffic? Our website (lightbite.blogspot.com) received 2,442 page views in total, peaking in January the month before the show. On the day of the show, the website got 52 hits, which would have included people who had picked up the magnets and were checking out the artists.
How did our artists use the website? Nearly all our artists had visited the LightBite website (95%). About two thirds had checked out the website of other artists taking part (63%) or had their own website linked on the LightBite website (62%). It was difficult for people to say whether they had new visitors to their website from the Light Bite link but 6 out of 15 who answered this question said they had.
Generating interest in Nottingham Light Night? 67% of our artists had visited the Nottingham Light Night website and 12% had made it to the event itself.
(All figures in this section based on website stats or people filling out our feedback survey)
What did artists think of taking part?
38% of artists said their favourite aspect of Light Bite was it taking part on the streets and away from the galleries. For 26%, their favourite part was people picking up the work for free.
All our artists agreed that taking part in Light Bite made them feel part of a network of artistis. Most also agreed that it was a good opportunity to show their work (98%) and made them more confident about their work (85%). About two thirds agreed it made them want to organise something similar (67%). Only 13% agreed that having the exhibition in their local area was important.
Everyone said they definitely or probably would take part in an OpenFridge exhibition again. Many of our LightBite artists have already put work in for our next Brighton Open exhibition, taking place as part of the Brighton Fringe Festival (in May 2011).
People filling out our feedback survey also gave us lots of ideas for improving the magnet shows in the future. Some things we will be trying to incorporate are trying to get more feedback from the public picking up the magnets, exploring other ideas for venues, increasing the number of magnets and staggering the placing of magnets (rather than putting them out all at once as they can disappear quickly!).
(Information in this section based on people filling out our feedback survey)
This information is based on our list of participating artists, website statistics for lightbite.blogspot.com and a feedback survey that all artists were invited to fill out on www.surveymonkey.com (44 people filled out all or some of the questions).
