Keeping Fabrica's doors open

At the end of this week I'll be at Fabrica Gallery in Brighton with Jane Fordham, marshalling writers and artists who've collectively raised more than £5,000 to keep it going.

Fabrica launched a crowdfunding campaign early in February to raise £20,000 after losing a local authority grant.

Jane and I organised a Draw-a-Thon and Writing Relay to support the campaign. We have 25 writers signed up to share the contents of their minds for 30 minutes with the public - as they write, their words are going to be projected onto a screen.

The artists, meanwhile, will be drawing for five hours non-stop to earn their sponsorship! They'll be allocated paper and a pencil, free tea, coffee and biscuits and the chance to stretch once an hour. There'll be more than 30 of them, drawing from models or imagination, between 11 am and 4 pm on Saturday 24 February.

Jane and I met through Fabrica more than a decade ago and have been talking about work, ideas and collaboration ever since. We went to the Avignon festival in a Fabrica group of gallery educators, then back independently a couple of years running. Fabrica started our writing/drawing collaboration so that was the starting point for our event. But it's not just our event now. Brighton's creative community is galvanised to show what this city centre gallery, always free, always provocative, always engaged, means to us. What the arts mean. Why doors need to be kept open.

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