Local artist Brad Hartshorn has some of his original artwork up on display at LITTLE big for the entire month of February.
Asha Robertson owns Little BIG, which serves both as a space to display the work of the multitude of talented artists in the area as well as the headquarters for her ceramics production company Dirt Light Shadow.
The space opened officially at the end of June; quietly, as Robertson put it, because they weren’t able to do any sort of event to celebrate the occasion due to COVID.
“We quietly opened our door and hoped for the best and the response has been really great,” she said.
Before she opened the shop, she had a working studio in town for a number of years where she made her jewellery and other items that she sold in stores all over Canada.
“With coronavirus things changed a lot for me, so I was like ‘okay we’re opening a shop,” she said. “We intended to from the beginning, but it was going to be this open studio, but this has been unforeseen but exciting.”
She said she’s been mentally curating artists for several years and now has been able to showcase it regularly.
Robertson wasn’t aware of Hartshorn’s work until she opened the shop and he reached out. She said that since she opened her doors she’s been able to meet people in town that wouldn’t otherwise have necessarily put together a cohesive body of work for display.
Hartshorn knew of Robertson, liked the work she did and had met her at her previous space. He knew that little BIG had opened and was hosting artists every month so he reached out.
“It’s motivation for me to do things, because I had a ‘real job’ for the last year and a half and I was not doing any art, so I recently started painting again,” Hartshorn said. “It’s nice to be able to put some stuff up and have a reason to do so.”
The application process to have your artwork put on display at little BIG, so far has pretty much mostly been done through one-on-one conversations, but Robertson said that their intention is to be more organized about it, as they are getting more inquiries.
“Usually it’s reaching out through social media and then we’ll send a little application form to send out so that we can honour each person,” Robertson said.
READ: Online art offerings at Centre 64
carolyn.grant@kimberleybulletin.com
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