Meet the Partners: Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange

ACC: Can you tell us a little bit about your venue and what makes it special?

HP: Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange is special for many reasons. Firstly, the small team will always go above and beyond to make you feel welcome and work hard to meet deadlines with the best possible quality of work. I arrived in Penzance around January 2020 and I remember my first staff meeting, it had a great energy that was open to sharing with the wider team. That sense of transparency and collaboration is routine in the office, and since the pandemic I have seen the same people go hard to deliver and support new projects for lockdown audiences. It’s a great team to be a part of. 

Another special thing about our venue is that we have two distinct main spaces, and with one ticket you get access to both venues. We have The Exchange in the heart of Penzance, the building has a beautiful glass exterior that looks magical when it lit up at night. The view from the Newlyn Art Gallery is really really our best kept secret. Built 125 years ago, the famous building is just beautiful and now we have our outdoor café space where our audiences can enjoy delicious cakes and coffee whilst on the look out for seals in Mounts Bay!

ACC: What made you want to be a part of the Newlyn team and what was your route into working in the museum sector?

HP: My experience in Digital Producing comes from a theatre and performance background. I knew I wanted to explore with Digital as this flexible model / tool for harnessing engagement online. I was innovating with live streaming and content for Off West End venues at the time, but I knew that I wanted to test my own skill set within a regional venue. I had an instinct to investigate arts organisations, including galleries, as I’d always found that large scale art installations were at the forefront of representing artists pushing the limits of multimedia or complex technical exhibitions and were always playing with digital innovations. 

ACC: What has been the highlight of the partnership for you so far?

HP: Welcoming our first shows Hippo Campus: Where We Learn and Go On Being So. I loved working on both of those shows and I’m relatively new to the organisation, so it was a great initiation. Hippo Campus was a show about the process and history of learning and it had lots of multimedia that I was responsible for organising. I love figuring out the digital set up of a show, I always compare it to a similar process of a circuit board in trying to make the whole system work as a part of a wider vision. For Go On Being So we had films from the Art Council Collection that had been selected by 12 – 16 year olds, but my favourite part of that exhibition was filming a Talking Heads interview about their own experiences as art curators.