Visiting galleries

As part of our making-work-and-selling-it-to-people plan, we spent the whole of yesterday visiting craft galleries… well, we visited four galleries in a round trip of 216 miles.

The reason we went so far is because you can’t just send information to every gallery willy nilly (or worse, just turn up on the doorstep with a box of stuff), you need to find the galleries that are right for you, where your work will fit and then approach said gallery like a proper business person. There’s no point sending information about your lovely ceramics to a gallery that only sells paintings!

We spent a long time doing research via the interweb and the book Craft Galleries Guide to narrow it down to 10 or so that might work for any of the three of us, but nothing compares to actually seeing the gallery in the flesh, so to speak. Since we already know what the galleries closest to us are like, we headed south (irritating satnav in hand) for a bit of a recce.

It turns out a few inches on the map is further than you think – that coupled with me being the only one of us with a driving licence and a morbid fear of motorways made for a long trip. 

We didn’t ask any questions because we didn’t want to seem impertinent - we just needed to look and see for ourselves how they display the work; how big they are, what the area is like, what they are selling and how high the prices are. We took lots of notes and covert photos to remind us later.

It was very worthwhile, positive and informative, and despite only managing to see four galleries in that time it wasn’t a wasted day. We found galleries where some of our work would fit; we ruled out some galleries we weren’t sure about, we saw far too many beautiful things that we wanted to buy and we have a lot more places to look at when we head west next week.

All in all a good day was had by all, but we’re very sleepy today!

Beccy