Making Your Art Economically Viable

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Elizabeth Corkery is a large-scale installation artist and the founder of Print Club Ltd., a limited edition print making company. Her most recent and ambitious project to date is a spatially transformative sculptural exhibition called Ruin Sequence at Tower Hill Botanic Gardens, opening October 8th. The project is funded by the Clark Hulings Fund Business Accelerator Program. Topics Include:

Preparations for Ruin Sequence:

“I started conceiving how I might make a body of work that was sculpturally-based and that could be presented alongside the plants.”
“Probably about a dozen of the pieces were made at a residency in London. Then I would say another dozen have been made since coming home.”
“This is my first foray into a new series of work that was sculpturally based rather than starting from print as the medium.”
“Navigating the materiality of the pieces and how I wanted to construct them was probably the most challenging part.”
“It’s not a conventional art world or gallery site, so it is going to expand awareness and hopefully appreciation of my work to a group of people that would otherwise not necessarily have encountered it.”

Clark Hulings Business Accelerator Program:

CHF funded the “fabrication of modular pedestal supports and also the transport of those and some of the marketing materials that are being produced in tandem with the show.”
The Business Accelerator Program allowed me to “discover how applicable a lot of those strategies would be for promoting my personal work as well. That’s definitely a take away that I’ll be putting some of those strategies into place when I’m promoting this show and sharing imagery of this new work.”

Print Club Ltd.:

The salability of my art is what “prompted my decision to start Print Club because I really enjoy the act of screen printing and making prints on a regular basis…”
“Print Club has become more of the commercial aspect of my work more so than my bigger installation practice.”
“I was inspired by how easy it’s become to set up a nice looking online store and market yourself online.”
“The next phase for Print Club is that I’m actually moving into inviting specific artists to do collaborative editions with me. It will be their designs, and we will work together to realize them as screen prints.”

Protecting the Integrity of a Work:

Importance of inventorying and tracking large pieces of work
“When you sell a work, you can’t always have that control, if it’s heading off to a place that you can’t accompany it to.”
“This work that’s going into the greenhouse, as I said there’s going to be a big of unpredictability about how it’s going to survive the next six months. I plan to make it available for sale, and I also am confident that it will survive the winter in the greenhouse.”

Cross-over between Commercial Art and Fine Art:

“The two can feed each other. I’ve learnt about marketing and about communicating the work online can be used to help promote my personal work as well.
“They require some specific strategies for each of them. I’m still figuring out, as I said, how some of those marketing strategies could actually live for my own work as well. That’s a work in progress.”
“I think having a business that’s run by an artist that has a career in their own right beyond the work that they’re making for that business only stands to raise the profile of the more commercial prints.”

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About Daniel DiGriz

Daniel DiGriz is CHF's Director of Education & Marketing, co-founder of management consulting firm Free Agent Source Inc., and Digital Ecologist® at MadPipe which helps organizations connect with their audiences by framing educational programs and marketing with a powerful company story. His background in Fortune 500 life is in sales, marketing, instructional design, and corporate training. Daniel is a corporate storyteller who hosts podcasts, speaks at conferences, and is a contributor to Forbes.