6/2 Internship Update


Short history of the ICVL internship saga. I got involved with ICVL back in the first few days of September 2024 when I signed up to volunteer for BPF. I put in a lot of overtime to the role doing things like door knocking and covering paid shifts and built a good relationship with Ben. In January 2025 they started doing events every 1st Thursday of the month which I helped out with, during this time I got to know Alex better and solidified my usefulness a bit more. After summer this year I saw Alex at Alice Poyzer’s opening and he mentioned that I should pop by anytime to have a chat, so I tried to take him up on it, but he was out both times! The second time I had schlepped all the way there I decided to get his number off of anyone I could and send him a message. I won’t copy the whole thing in but I just asked: Could I get involved in any unpaid work, but maybe in a more structured, regular pattern and call it something like an internship? 

Alex was very busy at the time it turns out, putting on Vincen Beekman’s show, so he was really kind to give me any of his limited time over that period. From my end I was just confused for a while, I was invited to the space a couple times but there was always someone else there or something else going on. 

In early December we had a proper chat and Alex laid out an imagined plan for me, involving a few helpful volunteering days and then me applying for an internship they were running (and hopefully getting it), and moving on from there towards more hours if I quit my job. I thought it was really sweet that he was putting it like this, as a plan for me, very kind! 

I made a CV, wrote a cover letter, and got very excited about quitting my bar job. Unfortunately a few weeks later I figured out that they weren’t actually on the list of UWE internships, and it turns out there had been a mistake and they missed the opportunity to run one. Boo. I talked to Alex about alternatives, I sent a CV to Bread and Butter, but they never replied and it looked like largely the plans had been put to bed. 

In January I decided to send them my CV and cover letter anyway under the pretext that I was going to force my way in one way or another, I think it went down well enough. Then when I went for a coffee with Billy during the same weekend of Max Ferguson’s Koppel Exhibition (solid networking weekend) and he mentioned that he had bagged a student arranged internship with UWE. I emailed the careers people in Jan and I will copy in the correspondence here (might be useful for future students?)


Eek.. At this point in the email chain it’s worth mentioning that I did not check with Alex and ben before sending this out, I just assumed that they would rather not be bothered with something so speculative, and thought I would have time to raise it with them gently once I got an idea of the likelihood. Soo, had to send a few hurried/ apologetic/ celebratory texts and emails to try and get a response in the 2 day window before the week ended. Given they missed the last funding opportunity because of a deadline, I was not 100% hopeful.

Alejandro called me during Billy assist day to talk about it, he raised the fact that I hadn’t put this past them first and I tried to explain, seemed to think it was definitely cheeky but didn’t mind too much. His main concern was that they would still have to pay national insurance, so it was not a free pass for them, and at that point in the call I figured it wasn’t going to happen after all. Aside from that though he did start to tell me about an opportunity within their ongoing Avonmouth project, to be trained up to be one of the main people responsible for archiving it! He said to take it with a pinch of salt and that I certainly did, it’s an ongoing potentially but entirely dependant on funding and going to be decided very late in the day. I am patching my file up a bit so writing this bit later, but before I took the Photographique job I did double check with Alex, and he said not to turn anything firm down in favour of this opportunity, so who knows if it will ever happen.

All said and done, Alex signed the contract for the internship almost immediately, big ups! The dates had to be changed from around the festival to May - July, which scared me shitless at first because I already felt stressed and May/ June are going to be the worst of it. But since then I have worked on loosening other commitments and this is such an exciting opportunity. 

Since then I’ve made the beginnings of an accountability plan, a checklist of things from other curatorial internships sourced from the internet and call for curators which I got a week’s free trial for before cancelling, which I will ideally be able to fulfill in future applications through experiences from this role. 


Public Programme:

  • Support the delivery of public events, workshops, and discussions
  • Assist the team in the planning and preparation of events and workshops
  • Provide operational support to the programming team during the installation and running of exhibitions.

Administration:

  • Monitor inboxes and respond to email enquiries with support from the programming team.
  • Assist with the administration of Open Calls, including filing, collating applications, communicating with applicants, and inputting data to Salesforce and Microsoft Excel
  • Carry out desk-based research on the art education sector.
  • Practical experience supporting the delivery of projects or programmes, including the co-ordination of timelines, meetings and actions
  • Experience in administration, working with bulk data on software such as Excel and Google Sheet. 

Practical:

  • Experience in art handling. 
  • Proven experience of archiving and cataloguing. 
  • Recording artworks into an inventory software. 
  • Measuring and weighing artworks.
  • General art handling and art packing. 
  • Handling, analysis and manipulating bulk data. 
  • Condition reports. 
  • Photographing artworks. 
  • Provenance research.
  • Acquisition and financial research. 
   • Recording conservation and maintenance.