Working together to improve local arts

Oliver Flexman: "I work for PVAC, which is Plymouth Visual Arts Consortium. It's a network of eight organisations who've been together for the last few years, and we work together collaboratively to develop the capacity and the resources for the visual arts sector in Plymouth. It's a case of sharing resources, sharing expertise across the city -- Plymouth is quite small, so we can match the ambition of the city, which is quite large. So sharing resources and pooling the elements that we have, we can achieve much more. So that was the general premise of it.

"We're finding that it has a big impact in the curatorial decisions, the connections with other organisations outside Plymouth which we probably wouldn't have had, the level of exchange is improving, and certainly it strengthens our ability to fundraise across the city.

"The obvious issue has to be funding or the uncertainty about funding over the next few years, and that permeates through all layers. We struggle because we don't have particularly long contracts in lots of cases and you can't be assured that the playing field is going to be the same next year. So a lot of work is done in good faith that it can be followed through, so that level of uncertainty makes life difficult.

"The southwest is getting better at retaining artists. There's been a good level of artists who've moved out of London or moved back to the southwest, but the biggest challenge is keeping artists down here and providing resources and support for them to develop proper careers, and a lot of work goes into that.

"Plymouth will be hosting the British Art Show in 2011, which is great, because that's galvanising the network, galvanising different partners who the arts organisations in the city perhaps don't have very strong relationships with, which can be built for this particular project. So it's a step change for us for audience development and capacity building."