MINUTES
CASA COMMITTEE MEETING 29 JANUARY 2024
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Committee members present
Richard Moon
Joan Pickett
Di Jones
Lynda Holloran
Roz Roden
The committee met mainly to discuss events for the coming year, especially those associated with the 900th anniversary celebrations for St Kyneburgha's Church.
Roz Roden had researched several promising workshops and demos, and had a provisional programme put together, which was agreed by the committee. This year's events are smaller in scale than previous years, with a couple of them being held within our Monday morning sessions. There are two for the spring, a break for the 900th anniversary events, and then another two in the late summer/autumn.
The village is doing a big programme of celebrations for the 900th anniversary, and it was proposed that CASA could do something to tie in with this. The main celebrations are in the summer, over two weeks and three weekends. It was agreed that we could do an open painting weekend, open to all, to paint the church and things in and around it. We talked about the practicalities of this, such as having access to the Cedar Centre for toilets etc, whether to provide art materials, and whether to approach the school to see about the children participating. On the latter issue it was agreed that we can't supervise children ourselves, as we don't have the capacity to do so (no DBS checks, insurance etc), so anything for the open weekend would need to be parents supervising their own children, or perhaps the school organising something.
We could then on the subsequent weekend hold an exhibition of the works done on the open weekend. It was agreed that we would have this separately from our usual main exhibition, and subject to their agreement, perhaps held in the church. It would be open to anyone who has a relevant work of art, not just art made during the open weekend.
The final weekend has the main event on the school field, in place of the usual village fete, so we agreed we would do our usual exhibition at the Cedar Centre that weekend, with the church exhibition the middle weekend, and the open weekend the first weekend of the two weeks.
There was another proposal to perhaps run an open competition on the theme of painting St Kyneburgha, given the 900th anniversary and her standing. It was suggested that this could be open nationally with appropriate advertising, and that we could offer prize money, and that this could be quite a big event. It was agreed we would look into the feasibility of this, but initial thoughts were that our experience with the website was that it was very difficult indeed to gain national publicity, and that simply putting the event online would not be enough. In addition, we are only a small club, with limited resources, and things like meaningful prize money and providing sufficient resources to give this the publicity it would need could well be beyond our financial means.