Aller-retour
October 26, 2011 § 3 Comments
So we all got back from France about three weeks ago, took some time for a breather, and then last Sunday met up again to debrief, start going through the images we’d brought back, and begin planning our next moves.
This was the second year in a row we were artists-in-residence at Château du Perron, and taking back with us some kind of exhibition, so we could show people the work we did the year before, seemed a good idea, but why a newsprint exhibition? As well as wanting to try out Newspaper Club, we figured we needed something that was relatively quick and inexpensive to produce, easy to transport, and that could be hung almost anywhere without much fuss, so newsprint seemed to fit the bill. The fact that the exhibition also worked well as a publication was a bonus.
We had a lot of fun with it too (and these are just a few of the pictures we took of it, there are more on Facebook and Flickr). The exhibition it was originally intended for was hung in front of giant wine barrels in a different part of the same working barn we exhibited in last year. Richard played with it outside, pegging it out on the château’s washing line. I photographed Richard with it on the terrasse of a café in the neighbouring town of Richelieu. And we offered a copy as a prize in the château tombola – the lady flicking through it in the picture below was the winner.
As I wrote previous post, we had just ten copies printed. Two were used for the exhibition. One was a tombola prize. We sold three, gave two as gifts, and left one as a promo with the gallerist we met with when we went to Paris. So we only have one left… About a week ago we showed it to someone whose judgement we trust, and they gave us some very positive feedback, so we’re now seriously considering reprinting and making the copies available to buy – we need to fundraise for our exhibition in London somehow, might selling newspapers help?
The problem is that Wideyed doesn’t have the funds to finance another print run of any size. The only way we can afford to re-edition the newspaper is to take pre-orders. We’re not sure how to successfully go about doing that… but while we’re mulling it over the newspaper is available to view online at www.newspaperclub.com/wideyed
Our exhibition, ‘In Vino Veritas’, will run from 25th April – 5th May 2012 at Art House in London, with a preview event on 27th April (times TBC). We’ve got six months to prepare and we’ve got lots of ideas about what kind of exhibition it could be, so we’ll be talking about it more here as things progress.
Meanwhile, if anyone has any thoughts or advice about selling newspapers, or would just like to buy one even, please let us know!
Cheers, Lucy
Wideyed 
the newspaper looks great – but expensive 😦 How much would a copy cost? Cheers mike
Hi Mike, the price is a bit of an issue… We sold the 3 newspapers from our print run of 10 at €25 each, which is around £22-ish, and after deducting P&P to France would have been left with roughly a fiver per paper to put towards our exhibition fund if we’d sold enough papers to cover the print costs first. £22 inc P&P is getting towards the price of a decent book, so it seems a lot to ask for a newsprint publication – even one that has 64 pages. The way to bring the unit price down, of course, is to invest in a large print run up front and hope we could sell them, but we’re a bit skint at the moment…
So we’re not sure what to do! Really chuffed you like the look of it enough to be interested in buying one though – thanks for letting us know, it’s really made my day!
Cheers, Lucy
Actually, I’ve just had a chat with Richard, and he made the very good point that it wouldn’t be fair to the people we’ve already sold newspapers to if we charged less for further copies.
So the price has been set already, and it’s €25/£22 inc P&P.