RAFT
Region: Dorset | City: Dorchester
RAFT is a Dorset based group developing and promoting visual and contemporary arts. They co-operatively run the Monkton Gallery, south of Dorchester, and worked in collaboration with the Dorset County Museum to stage the Artyfacts project.
www.raftdorset.info
RAFT is a loose collaboration of artists, mainly visual, who came together as a result of networking through the Dorset Art Weeks. They take on projects as the mood takes them! The co-operatively run Monkton Gallery started in 2002 in a Church Hall in the hamlet of Winterborne Monkton, just south of the Maiden Castle Hillfort. The 6 or so “Monks” share stewarding and demonstrating duties on the Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays when they are open, together will all the other tasks of galleryship.
The Artyfacts project staged in 2004 saw the members of RAFT and their guests creating a body of new work inspired by the artists responses to the collections in the Dorset County Museum, Dorchester. 14 artists gained a huge boost in creativity and profile from the project.
RAFT will be considering what to do in the future, a possible venture is to become involved with the diversification of local farm buildings into artists studios and as a centre for a market combining locally produced art, craft and foods.
alias has been incredibly helpful to RAFT.
Robert Parker, famous woodworker from Makers in Taunton, came and gave some “warts and all” advice about setting up the gallery and provided masses of enthusiasm, tempered with warnings, which help convince the RAFT members to go ahead with more confidence.
Paul Harper came and gave advice about the development of the group dynamic, with an outsider’s view of the confusion between the Gallery, run by a small number of artists, and the whole RAFT group. Paul also gave advice about the planning of the Artyfacts project and helped to crystallise the ideas (although he does not get the blame for the Arts Council grant being turned down!)
Bill Crumbleholme, a founder member of RAFT, has dived into alias as a specialist contact.