Friday Focus: Andrew Salmon, organiser of the Knitting and Stitching Shows

Article Added: 01/05/2009 10:52:40
This week we have been talking to Andrew Salmon, organiser of the Knitting and Stitching Shows. This is a must read interview for all artists and designers with ambitions of being featured at these great shows.

Your textile exhibitions provide inspiration for many visitors with a passion for textiles and craft. What inspired you to set up Creative Exhibitions
Jan King the other organiser of the shows and myself were both working for plc companies and wanted to break out on our own. We did so, and were consciously looking for an area which hadn’t really benefited from a major show. By coincidence, a friend had started a small, embryonic stitching show but was terrified about the risk she was taking – she had her house on the line and that made her very nervous – so the inevitable happened and we took it over.  I freely confess that, in those early days, the subject matter was fairly irrelevant to us but I soon developed a real love for textiles, which I hope comes through in our events.

Can you tell us more about what both visitors and exhibitors can expect from The Knitting and Stitching Show
As far as visitors are concerned we are trying to cater for everybody, from the 15 year old with an interest in fashion to the 90 year old with a love of Elizabethan samplers. We want the shows to challenge every single visitor and provide everyone with something to just take their interest to the next level. Plus, of course, we aim to supply visitors with the supplies needed to indulge their hobby.

For the exhibitors we can offer a virtual guarantee of high numbers of interested people. Year-on-year for the last 20 years we have seen a growth in the numbers of visitors to the show and these people are all looking for new inspiration, which – in turn – encourages them to spend money!

Creative Exhibitions have now been staging successful public exhibitors in textiles for 20 years. How have the exhibitions developed over this time
We have seen them develop from simple, straightforward commercial events where retailers would buy a stand and sell their products, to more complex shows that now covers the whole spectrum of creative textiles, with major add-ons such as galleries and education programmes. Our education programme has grown from six workshops when it was first introduced to one now containing over 200 workshops. We have also introduced the graduate showcases to support schools and colleges who are encouraging a new group of artists – altogether the events have become far more wide ranging.

Is the content of each of the shows inspired by what crafts are popular at the time
Not really – it’s just a question of balance. We never pander to what’s popular at any one time. For example we were pushing knitting at one of the shows in the Mid 90s, long before it became popular again, and we did the same with batik a few years later. We want to push all forms of textile craft, not just those that are trendy at the time. Some crafts are all the rage one minute and gone the next and I feel the success of our shows comes because people know we aren’t going to be riding on the back of this – we will give all crafts a fair viewing.

Every year Creative Exhibitions attracts over 168,000 visitors from 50 countries. Do you have any plans to make future events even bigger and attract even more visitors
Yes! But it is a balance thing – we aren’t interested in growth for the sake of growth. The show at Alexandra Palace is already the biggest of its kind in Europe, so we aren’t looking to make the show bigger in terms of size, but rather in completeness.

Is there an area of the show you would like to develop to achieve this completeness
I would like to see the manufacturers playing a greater part in future. At the moment the visitors see what the retailers want them to – the products that they have available. I would like to see the public getting the chance to see everything that is on offer. The internet is a great resource to show the complete range of products, but it doesn’t allow people to play with the products or touch them and try them out. We are trying to promote and excite people about textiles, so we want people to be able to come to the shows and find out what is available through using the products and being more hands-on.

Can you give us any hints of what we can expect to see at the shows in future
We have an Australian artist, Christine Henri, exhibiting at the shows next year, which we are all very excited about. Her installation will feature literally 15,000 white bonnets, all representing the suffering of female convicts shipped to Australia. It should be quite a sight and one on a par with the extraordinary Aids quilt in the USA. Each bonnet will be embroidered with the name of the convict as a small memorial. I liken it to the cemeteries in World War 1 battlefields – I think it will have a similar impact.

The Knitting and Stitching Show is always incredibly popular, with a diverse range of exhibitors and demonstrators. Are there any particularly exciting exhibits from over the years that have stuck in your mind
Absolutely! Lots of them as we get so excited about what we do! I was especially thrilled to be able to present galleries of new work by Pauline Burbidge and Alice Kettle as these are artists at the top of their game. It felt like a real honour that artists of this calibre wanted to share their new work with us.

Is there any advice you could give to new artists and designers who are thinking about applying for exhibition space at one of your shows
It is important to have a professional approach – enclose photographs of your work, tell us about the pieces and how many of them you want to show so we can build a picture of what is required. Also please recognise that what we offer actually costs a great deal of money. The lighting alone for each gallery costs us around £1,000 and we do not ask the artist for any commission whatsoever on work sold. The artist needs to recognise that their role is to stimulate and excite the public.

Are the gallery spaces already filled for the next few years
The large galleries are already filled until at least 2012, but smaller more modest galleries could probably be accommodated for the 2010 shows. My main advice is to get in early!

How important are the graduate showcases to the show
We wish to encourage sales of textile art and that’s the reason we offer these showcases and the gallery spaces. We are very supportive of the new talent coming through and it gives us great pleasure when the show allows these new artists to open studios or start little businesses.

How do you organise the tutors for the workshop programme If anyone reading would like to run a workshop at one of the Knitting and Stitching Shows what should they do
They should phone Anna Baptiste as she puts together the educational programme for the shows. She is hugely receptive to new ideas and keeping the workshops fresh and different. Be innovative in your subject area as we get literally hundreds of submissions and of course can’t accommodate them all. These workshops are great for the artists taking them as we are able to put thousands of people through the programme during each show. We want to allow people to try out new techniques without cost being a barrier, so many of our events are free to take part in. This means that again we are subsidising the programme so cannot afford to pay the artists the commercial rates, but what we can do is help them to sell their books or fill their diaries for the next year with other demonstrations or workshops. We have already planned all the workshop spaces for this year, so we are now looking for submissions for the 2010 programme.

The dates for this year’s Knitting and Stitching shows are:
8-11 October 2009 – Alexandra Palace
29 October-1 November 2009 – RDS Dublin
19-22 November 2009 – Harrogate International Centre
For tickets call 01473 320407.

For more information about The Knitting and Stitching Shows please click here.

These Friday Focus interviews are exclusively for gold members of the site. If you would like to upgrade your listing so you can be featured please call David Clegg on 01386 760406 or email david.clegg@thehothive.com.