How My First Art Exhibition Went (And What It Taught Me About Showing My Work)
My first art exhibition didn't go entirely to plan. From setting myself absurd goals to discovering the space two weeks before the event, TEDxLeith taught me a lot about what I'd do differently — and what might make an exhibition successful, at least to me.
Earlier this year, I went to a networking event in Edinburgh called eCorner. I met Enia there, who was in the process of organising TEDx Leith. We got talking about art and she mentioned that she'd be interested in having an exhibition at the event.
So I did what any reasonable person with one finished painting and an idea would do...
I invited her for coffee and pitched a whole exhibition.
Pitch the idea before you're ready
At the time, Villains barely existed. I had an idea for six portraits of well-known women who had been villainised in different ways. Of those six, I'd actually painted precisely one: Greta Thunberg. I took Greta to the coffee shop with me.
The idea was to explore what I thought of as a kind of reverse alchemy of women — the way something recognisable in a woman can be transformed through language and judgement into something ugly.
Anger becomes hysteria.
Boundaries become selfishness.
Pain becomes drama.
A woman becomes the problem.
Enia liked it! And suddenly my idea had somewhere to go.
We talked about how it could become something dynamic for TEDx rather than simply putting six portraits on a wall. I wanted ordinary women represented alongside public figures. Originally, I planned a composite portrait made from four different women's faces. I wanted people looking at Villains to be able to recognise something of themselves in it.
I had also painted a self-portrait before Villains existed. I decided I would destroy that in the same way as the other portraits.
After presenting the audience with all of this (inherently negative) work, I then wanted to invite visitors to leave their feedback on a new self-portrait - during the exhibition. I wanted to see what would happen if they got to change the image instead.
Could we create some alchemy in that room?
And because destruction had become such an important part of the work, obviously I also decided I needed to make a film.
This was all very exciting.
It was also completely insane.
My first art exhibition taught me not to make EVERYTHING
I had about six weeks.
In those six weeks, I set myself the (totally, bloody insane) goal of painting the five remaining public figures, four more portraits for a composite piece, another self-portrait, as well as altering an existing self-portrait, creating an interactive work, and making a film.
You can't say I didn't take the opportunity seriously!
But something important happened while I was frantically making all of this.
Villains changed.
Real women's stories began to enter the project, and they were much more interesting to me than executing the exhibition exactly as I'd originally pitched it.
So I let it change.
The composite portrait disappeared. Individual women's stories took its place. I even brought blank canvases to TEDx as part of the display, because by then that was part of the story too.
Villains wasn't finished. It was growing.
I stopped treating the proposal I'd made weeks earlier as a limiting contract and decided to show people what the project was actually becoming.
That's probably one of the most useful things I learned: the opportunity should serve the work. The work shouldn't have to contort itself to preserve an old pitch.
For the love of God, look at the space
This is the considerably more practical lesson. About two weeks before TEDxLeith, we were given an opportunity to visit the venue and work out how everything would be installed.
I arrived with all my work so far and a lot of excitement.
And then I saw the room.
Dark stone arches. Uneven stone walls. Very little lighting. Nowhere obvious to hang a collection of paintings.
This was not a gallery.
Suddenly I wasn't thinking about concepts or reverse alchemy. I was thinking:
How the fuck am I going to put these on the wall?
I considered individual lights for every portrait. I looked at different hanging systems. Every solution seemed to require buying another thing, and the costs were rapidly becoming ridiculous.
There was also a calculation I hadn't really made before. TEDx events have limited audiences. Those people would be there all day, which made them a wonderful captive audience, but this was never going to be an exhibition with hundreds of visitors.
Good thing really, as I didn't even have anything to sell!
The goal was exposure for Villains.
So spending hundreds of points trying to make this space work, in the traditional gallery sense, made zero economic sense.
So I worked with what was already there.
The venue had long tables normally used for markets. I bought black fabric and covered them. I put every portrait into a box frame, painted the backs black and placed them on little wire stands that angled the work towards the viewer.
I printed the women's stories and information about the work and attached those to the fabric.
And you know what?
It was good enough.
But it looked intentional. And it communicated the journey that Villains was becoming.
Part-done is still done
I finished the film ridiculously close to the event. There were things I wanted to do that didn't happen. The film was playing on a tiny monitor rather than being the installation I'd imagined. The interactive self-portrait wasn't signposted well enough. And I discovered that people were very shy about writing on the work. It took my kids gleefully demonstrating after school that, yes, I really wanted them to (it was actually a really beautiful moment worthy of its own post).
It wasn't 100% of what had existed in my head.
But nobody else knew that. They saw the work that was there.
And I got really positive responses to it!
There is something incredibly freeing in realising that your audience cannot see the version you failed to make. They can only experience the thing you actually put in front of them. And even better that they liked it!
Hardly anyone came to my first art exhibition
Here's the slightly anticlimactic bit.... I think about eight people came upstairs.
The exhibition space was separate from the main TEDx speaker area, and during breaks people quite reasonably wanted to go outside, get food, have a drink, smoke, talk to each other and decompress. Going upstairs to look at an art exhibition wasn't necessarily top of their list.
Earlier in this process, I think that would have devastated me. But by the time the event happened, strangely, it didn't. Because I'd received an enormous amount from TEDx before anyone walked into the exhibition.
I'd been given a deadline.
I'd been given external validation that this little idea I had was interesting enough to pursue.
I'd been forced to make.
I'd taken Villains from one painting and an idea into an actual body of work.
And I'd gained the credibility that came with being able to say the project had been exhibited at TEDxLeith.
TEDx put a fire under my backside.
Without that date in the calendar, I don't know how long Villains might have remained an idea.
So what counts as success?
Afterwards, people asked me “did you sell anything?”
No. But I hadn't tried to.
It occurred to me that, in future, selling work might actually be quite a sensible goal for an exhibition.
This sounds obvious now.
But Villains had begun as a passion project and increasingly felt like a social project as well as an art project. I was so focused on getting people to encounter these women's stories that I'd never really articulated what I wanted the exhibition to do.
That's something I'll change next time.
Before exhibiting again, I want to be able to answer: why am I doing this?
Maybe I want sales.
Maybe I want submissions.
Maybe I want press.
Maybe I want funding.
Maybe I want people to encounter an idea they haven't considered before.
Maybe I simply want someone to stop in front of a woman's face and listen to her.
And actually, that last one happened.
One of the handful of people who came upstairs stood looking at Villains and said something along the lines of:
“I didn't know this was happening. It's kind of shocking. Thank you for sharing this.”
There it was.
A goal I hadn't known how to articulate.
Someone had encountered something outside their experience. The work had made them stop. It had shown them something.
Eight people came upstairs.
One of them left knowing something they hadn't known when they arrived.
I'll take that as a win.
What I'll do at my next art exhibition
I have now done precisely one art exhibition, so I'm certainly not about to start dispensing rules about how to do them. But there are things I know I'll carry into the next one.
I'll want to see the space much earlier.
I'll think more realistically about what I can produce in the time I have.
If I'm asking an audience to participate, I'll make it much more obvious what I'm inviting them to do.
I'll think about how people actually find and move through the exhibition — including the very literal question of whether they know it's there.
And, importantly, I'll ask myself what I actually want to get from it. Maybe that's sales. Maybe it's submissions, press, funding or new opportunities. Maybe it's simply getting a particular piece of work in front of people who haven't encountered the idea before. I suspect it'll be different every time.
And I'm sure my second exhibition will teach me an entirely new list of things I hadn't considered.
But perhaps the biggest thing my first art exhibition taught me wasn't actually about exhibiting at all.
It was that sometimes an opportunity is valuable because of what it makes you become to meet it.
I walked into that coffee shop carrying one painting.
Six weeks later, Villains existed.
That was worth considerably more than eight visitors.
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